ook! Books! The Tired Old Mid-Manhattan Library Gets a Crisp New Identity.” This Curbed headline, for a glowing piece by Justin Davidson, referred to a new circulating library in central Manhattan, renamed the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library. Davidson celebrated the light-filled atrium, elegant staircase, rooftop terrace, and innovative children’s area. A famously decrepit and malodorous building has been utterly transformed.1

A reader of Davidson’s piece could be forgiven for thinking that the Stavros Niarchos, a major branch of the New York Public Library, resulted from an act of benevolence by the NYPL trustees. That is hardly the case. The new library, which cost $200 million and occupies 180,000 square feet, owes its existence to two and a half years of tenacious activism against the NYPL, whose trustees, from 2007 to 2014, were bent on selling the property, on 40th Street and Fifth Avenue, to real estate developers.2

How did one of the world’s greatest libraries get into the real estate business? It’s a sordid case study of how corporate logic has penetrated nonprofit institutions, including large, urban public library systems.3

In 2007, on the advice of the corporate consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton (which was paid $2.7 million), the NYPL trustees quietly enacted a radical plan entailing, in the words of its then-COO, the “monetizing of non-core assets.” This amounted to selling NYPL property in central Manhattan so that the library could profit from the city’s real estate boom. Three popular libraries would be sold: the beloved Donnell on 53rd Street, the Mid-Manhattan, and the relatively new Science, Industry, and Business Library on Madison Avenue.4

The trustees knew they had embarked on a risky course of action, one that would arouse public rage, so they proceeded in absolute secrecy. According to the minutes of one crucial trustee meeting in 2007 (a document that I obtained for my 2015 book Patience and Fortitude: Power, Real Estate, and the Fight to Save a Public Library), the chair of the NYPL board, Catherine Marron, “reminded all in attendance of the importance of maintaining confidentiality.”5

The secrecy held for four years as the plan crept forward. The Donnell—admired for its ambience, wide-ranging book collection, and performance space—was sold for a pittance; it is now a lackluster library in the basement of a luxury tower. But the 2008 recession made it difficult for the trustees to sell NYPL property, and in 2011 The Nation reported the full details of the Central Library Plan, under which the three libraries would be sold and the main building at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue would undergo a $300 million renovation entailing the demolition of its historic book stacks and the removal of 3 million books.6

Two and a half years of controversy followed the Nation report. An indefatigable group of citizens came together to save the libraries—independent scholars, freelance writers, professors, architects, historic preservationists, bookworms, and retired librarians. Their strategy combined activism and persuasion. Among many other things, they picketed the trustee meetings and the library’s annual fund-raising dinner; they arranged for thousands of e-mails to be sent to elected officials in New York City; and they filed two lawsuits against the plan. Their shrewdness and determination paid off when they persuaded mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio in the summer of 2013 to oppose the ­NYPL’s plan, which he did at a noisy press conference on the steps of the 42nd Street Library. Alarmed by the energy of the activist campaign, NYPL president Tony Marx, at the height of the row that year, signed a $25,000 contract with a lobbying group to mobilize construction unions, Teamsters, and clergy on behalf of the trustees’ ambitions. It was doomed to fail. In May 2014, Mayor de Blasio honored his campaign promise and canceled the plan to sell the Mid-Manhattan and renovate the main building. Instead of selling the library at 40th and Fifth, Marx’s task would now be to repair it.7

While the activists and the mayor had saved the Mid-Manhattan and halted the demolition of the core of the 42nd Street Library, much was still lost. Norman Foster, the architect hired to renovate the latter building, kept the $9 million he was paid for a project that was never undertaken. The NYPL admitted, when it was over, that it had squandered $18 million on its ill-fated plan, but the true figure is certainly much higher. It was an unconscionable waste of funds by a library system that is perennially underfunded and whose infrastructure and staffing needs are vast.8

The NYPL wars of 2011–2014 were about saving the libraries and preserving the books on the shelves. When the trustees hatched their plan in 2007, they mistakenly assumed that e-books would replace actual books. That faith impelled them to hastily remove 3 million volumes from the 42nd Street facility; those books were never returned to the stacks under the Rose Reading Room. It is appropriate that the new Stavros Niarchos Library has 400,000 books.9

But the NYPL wars were also about preserving democracy at the library. For much of its long history, the institution was democratic both in its internal structure and its relationship with the public. But under Paul LeClerc, who led it from 1993 to 2011, the library’s trustees behaved more like high-handed corporate executives than keepers of a public trust. When I reported on the NYPL story, a number of the wealthy and influential trustees who had executed the plan to sell the libraries—and who held elevated positions in banking and finance—refused to speak with me and would not even share their résumés. That behavior runs counter to the values of a great public library system.10

The NYPL’s most influential trustee is Stephen Schwarzman, cofounder of the private equity firm Blackstone, who gave $100 million to the library in 2008. He was a fierce advocate of the plan to gut the main building, which is named after him, and sell the three nearby libraries. After de Blasio canceled the plan, the NYPL trustees’ powerful executive committee met to cast a pro forma vote to officially terminate it. Only one member abstained from that vote: Schwarzman.11

I had an opportunity to speak with him in early 2014, following a trustee meeting at the 42nd Street location. The event had just concluded, and the trustees were retreating to their cocktail hour in a grand old room. I asked him if the $9 million paid to the architect, Foster, had come from his $100 million gift. Schwarzman, a man famously enamored of micromanagement, looked down at his shoes and said, “I’m not sure how the library is spending my money.” He added, “Don’t be an adversary. The renovation [of the 42nd Street building] will be great.” The renovation soon went to the graveyard.12

The NYPL has become somewhat more transparent since 2014, but it reflexively clings to secrecy. It has never shared the details of Schwarzman’s colossal gift and the ways in which it has been used. The pertinent question remains: How is the NYPL spending that $100 million? Today, New Yorkers have the midtown circulating library they deserve, the Stavros Niarchos; but they also deserve rudimentary information about the library’s most powerful benefactor.13

One morning in the spring of 2010, while standing in line in the New York Public Library’s majestic Rose Reading Room, I was approached by a middle-aged librarian, a man I had known for years; we had common interests and would frequently chat while he was on duty. He read The Nation and knew I wrote for it. On this particular morning, he leaned over and whispered into my ear: “Our trustees are planning to sell the library across the street”—by which he meant the Mid-Manhattan Library, a decrepit facility on 40th Street and Fifth Avenue. “It stinks,” he continued. “You should look into it.”

I was busy with other projects and let his tip go. But a year later, I received an assignment from this magazine to profile Anthony Marx, the New York Public Library’s incoming president. Early in my research, I quickly grasped what the librarian had tried to tell me a year earlier: The NYPL’s leadership—aided by the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton—had conceived a wildly ambitious transformation plan. The grand library at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue would undergo a massive renovation in which 3 million books would be removed from the historic stacks in the center of the building and sent to an off-site storage facility; the stacks would then be demolished, and a new, modern library (designed by the celebrated British architect Norman Foster) would be built in the space that, for a century, had held the books. Foster would create a library within a library, one that carried a heavy price tag: $300 million. To pay for this Central Library Plan (CLP), two nearby libraries that occupied prime real estate—the Mid-Manhattan Library and the Science, Industry, and Business Library on 34th Street and Madison Avenue—would be sold. In a soaring Manhattan real-estate market, the NYPL (which is the subject of Frederick Wiseman’s latest film, Ex Libris) would not be excluded from its share of the spoils.

But the CLP was a castle in the sky, developed—in absolute secrecy—in the heady, freewheeling years before the crash of 2008, when many American libraries and museums were hastily expanding their facilities. The NYPL, whose finances have been precarious since the late 1950s, had virtually no money of its own to invest in this real-estate and construction scheme; moreover, the sale of the two midtown libraries would not generate enough funds to cover the cost of the $300 million renovation project at 42nd Street. Taxpayer money would be required, and then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg was ready to give it: $150 million in city funds. The library’s most powerful trustee, Stephen Schwarzman—chairman of the investment firm Blackstone, and now an adviser to President Trump—was also firmly committed to Foster’s renovation and was prepared to help pay for it.

When the public learned about a plan that Sam Roberts, the urban-affairs correspondent for The New York Times, called “radical,” dismay and fury ensued. Two thousand scholars and writers signed a petition urging its cancellation; two prominent architecture critics (the late Ada Louise Huxtable of The Wall Street Journal and Michael Kimmelman of the Times) published devastating critiques; and a small but determined group of activists began to coalesce, with the aim of saving both the 42nd Street and Mid-Manhattan libraries.

These citizens—bookworms, retired librarians, grassroots organizers, historic preservationists—worked indefatigably for nearly two years. They used innovative protest tactics and built a wide-ranging coalition against the NYPL. They also convinced Bill de Blasio, then campaigning for mayor, to oppose the CLP. When de Blasio took office, he honored his campaign promise and told the NYPL that it could not sell the Mid-Manhattan Library; he also put a stop to Foster’s plan for the 42nd Street building.

Days later, the NYPL admitted that its estimate of $300 million for Foster’s renovation was far too low. The real price tag was $500 million—a sum, according to library staff members, that might have bankrupted the fragile NYPL, which operates nearly 100 branch libraries in the city, many of them in need of extensive repairs. The aborted CLP had cost the library, by its estimate, $18 million; my own estimate is much higher. Foster kept $9 million for a renovation that was never undertaken.

A calamity was averted: The activists and Mayor de Blasio had saved one of the world’s greatest libraries. I narrated these events in my 2015 book, Patience and Fortitude: Power, Real Estate, and the Fight to Save a Public Library.

hree and a half years after de Blasio’s intervention, and two years after the publication of my book, there are reasons for both optimism and concern about the overall direction of the NYPL.

The damage wrought by the CLP is strikingly evident on 53rd Street. Here, across from the Museum of Modern Art, at the base of a luxury hotel and apartment complex, is a new NYPL facility—compact, modern, soulless, cramped. For more than five decades, this was the site of the Donnell Library, adored by generations of New Yorkers for its wide-ranging collections, its congeniality, its quirkiness, and its community spirit. In 2007, during the first salvo of the CLP—undertaken four years before the full details of the plan were revealed—then–NYPL president Paul LeClerc sold the land beneath the Donnell to a hotel and travel company, Orient-Express Ltd. But the crash of 2008 wounded Orient-Express, and the Donnell Library sat empty for years. A new buyer, who was quick to see the property’s potential, was eventually found. The NYPL was paid $59 million for the land, just steps from MoMA. When the luxury tower was built, after the demolition of the Donnell, the penthouse apartment alone was advertised for $60 million, leading many observers to conclude that the NYPL had undersold the property.

The new library, which cost the NYPL $20 million to build, opened in June 2016. “Finally! After eight bookless years,” wrote Justin Davidson, the architecture critic for New York magazine, “53rd Street has its library back—if that’s the right word for a sleek but shrunken pit fitted out with bleachers, bar stools, and a megascreen, plus a smattering of circulating volumes.” Davidson’s conclusion: “Neither architects nor librarians shaped this branch; a real-estate deal did, one that reserved the cream of the square footage for the hotel and condo above, and sloughed off the leftovers on the public.”

Nicole Gelinas of City Journal, one of the few journalists in New York who monitors public libraries, was dismayed by the absence of natural light and the limited number of books on the premises: just 20,000, “a mere 7 percent of the previous holdings.” For Gelinas, the Donnell debacle is “one of the worst decisions made by a local public institution in decades.”

Following the CLP’s cancellation in 2014, the library’s leadership has been substantially altered. Despite a stormy tenure, Marx remains as president, but two key internal strategists for the plan have departed. The Manhattan real-estate developer Marshall Rose, who did so much to conceive and execute the scheme, is no longer an active trustee; and David Offensend, the swaggering chief operating officer (and former investment banker) who was Rose’s principal staff collaborator, quietly resigned in early 2014, just as the controversy over the Foster plan was reaching its crescendo. Offensend’s replacement was Iris Weinshall, a former high-ranking administrator at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the wife of Senator Chuck Schumer.

A shrewd move by Marx and the trustees was the hiring of William Kelly, a literary scholar and former interim chancellor of CUNY, as the director of the research division in late 2015. Kelly is now the NYPL’s liaison to its critics, who have welcomed his arrival. Says the historian David Nasaw, who was a plaintiff in a lawsuit to halt the CLP: “Kelly has highlighted the importance of the research collections—and their maintenance, expansion, and accessibility—to the NYPL’s mission and, I think, convinced many of the trustees of his point of view.” (Some trustees view the research division as a money pit.) Kelly invited two vocal critics, the historian Joan Scott—who, with the Princeton historian Stanley Katz, ignited the NYPL wars with an online petition in 2012—and the Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Annalyn Swan, to join a research advisory council devoted to the needs of writers and scholars. Scott and Swan have found Kelly a capable, open-minded interlocutor. “His appointment was one of our victories,” says Scott. “Of that I’m sure.”

he retention of the mid-Manhattan Library was a major victory for the critics, and a triumph for all New Yorkers who value public space in the heart of Manhattan. In late 2016, the library’s trustees approved a $200 million renovation plan for that decaying facility. Marx, who from 2011 to 2014 labored tirelessly to sell the Mid-Manhattan Library to real-estate developers, did a somersault and is now the principal booster for its new iteration: “We can finally give New York the central branch library it deserves,” he told The New York Times in November 2016. He promised to retain its substantial book collection, while also providing meeting spaces, a cafe, and a rooftop terrace. It will be, in his words, the “largest renovation” in the NYPL’s history; construction will begin soon. (When the Mid-Manhattan reopens in 2020, it will be renamed the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library.)

Following a difficult period, the 42nd Street Library has been revitalized. I left the United States in 2014, a few weeks after finishing the reporting for Patience and Fortitude. On a visit this past April, I found the building humming with energy: The Rose Reading Room, closed for two and a half years’ worth of ceiling repairs, looked magnificent; small rooms that were vacant from 2011 to 2014 had become quiet study areas; attractive new signage was added; the sleepy Periodicals Room had been enlivened; and the exhibitions on display (“Latin America in Photographs,” “Love in Venice”) were captivating. Even the restrooms were clean, properly maintained, and well lit.

Still, troubles remain at 42nd Street. Says Charles Warren, the president of the Committee to Save the New York Public Library (CSNYPL), whose members recently spearheaded a successful grassroots campaign to landmark the Rose Reading Room: “The real problem there is invisible. It is the uncertainty and delay in the delivery of books. Lately, this has improved some, and I know there are real efforts being made to address the problem, but it persists.” Marx, to his credit, has greatly expanded the space for books beneath Bryant Park, which has a capacious underground storage facility, but actually retrieving a volume from the NYPL’s collection can be a time-consuming, mystifying ordeal, as many researchers can attest.

Much of the drama surrounding Foster’s abandoned renovation plan concerned the fate of the old stacks at 42nd Street. When the CLP was canceled in 2014, Marx announced that the space would remain empty, prompting the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David Levering Lewis to remark to The Wall Street Journal: “Stacks without books. Isn’t this pretty Kafkaesque?” But lately the NYPL, to a very limited extent, has been using the stacks to house books and other materials from the Mid-Manhattan Library, as staff members prepare that building for its overhaul.

A few months ago, City Councilman Daniel Garodnick questioned Marx about the future of the stacks at 42nd Street. Marx replied: “We have not ruled out any uses and will soon begin a process to examine several possibilities.” For some of the critics, it’s not a lost cause. “The stacks are still mostly empty,” says Nasaw. “But, though I have no concrete evidence, I don’t think this will be the case forever. This piece of midtown real estate is too valuable to stay empty.”

he NYPL has stepped up its efforts to renovate the branch libraries in Manhattan, Staten Island, and the Bronx. (Brooklyn and Queens have their own library systems.) Marx has raised money to that end, and the de Blasio administration has allocated more resources than the previous mayor did. An NYPL spokesman told me that the library is working assiduously to rebuild and renovate facilities in “high-needs” neighborhoods: Hunts Point in the Bronx, and Port Richmond on Staten Island.

One afternoon in April, I went to see a few neighborhood libraries in Manhattan, starting with the Washington Heights branch on West 160th Street. I had visited this library with Marx in 2011; at that time, the entire facility was lackluster, and I was surprised to find, on the top floor, a large vacant apartment full of cobwebs, dust, and debris. In the first half of the 20th century, a custodian had lived there with his family, but the money was never found to renovate it. The apartment had been empty for half a century—wasted space above a bustling library in a densely populated neighborhood.

Today, the library has been transformed by a gut renovation. There’s a gleaming new elevator, new restrooms, comfortable seating areas, and a modest but well-chosen collection of books. There were six computers in 2011; now there are 72. Most strikingly, the old custodian’s apartment is now a bright and airy young-adult room, with attractive blue-and-gray carpeting, plenty of books on sturdy shelves, and new furniture.

My next stop was the Seward Park Library on the Lower East Side, which, for a long time, was a gloomy and dilapidated place. But here, too, change is apparent: I noticed new computers and work spaces, a tidy public-meeting room in the basement, and a wide selection of magazines, journals, and newspapers. Every seat was occupied. This library is also thriving.

My final destination was the Tompkins Square Library on East 10th Street. It was a joyless visit. The -building—which evokes the 1970s, when the NYPL nearly went bankrupt—feels cramped, neglected, and forgotten. I was struck by the frayed, dismal black carpet and the shabby tables and chairs. The lighting is poor, which makes reading difficult, and with only three desktop computers, the Tompkins Square Library can hardly meet the needs of the digital age. Staff members told me that conditions at the NYPL’s branch libraries in the Bronx are far worse. Some lack proper heat in winter.

propos of transparency at the NYPL, there has been some movement in the right direction. Weinshall, the current chief operating officer, is less enamored of secrecy than was her predecessor. Under pressure from library activists, Weinshall released to the public, in early 2016, a trove of planning documents pertaining to the renovation of the Mid-Manhattan Library. (She declined to be interviewed for this article.)

A revealing case study of the NYPL’s post-CLP openness concerns the Inwood branch in Upper Manhattan, where a controversy is under way. The de Blasio administration, the NYPL, and the Robin Hood Foundation—“Wall Street’s favorite charity,” according to philanthropy expert David Callahan—have quietly forged a plan to demolish the library, after which a developer will erect a new tower in its place. A new library will be built on the ground floor, beneath units of affordable housing. But activists are skeptical. Says Jeffrey Wollock, a historian and longtime Inwood resident, “The process has been undemocratic, unduly rushed and pressurized, misleading and vague, with no consideration of possible alternatives.”

The NYPL needs effective government regulation, but oversight seems unlikely. Shortly after the CLP was canceled, in May 2014, top city officials had an opportunity to appoint astute, sharp-eyed watchdogs to the library’s board of trustees, but they failed to do so. The mayor, the comptroller, and the speaker of the City Council are ex-officio trustees, and each appoints a representative to the board. (Mayor Bloomberg had appointed his sister, Marjorie Tiven.) The comptroller, Scott Stringer, and the Council speaker, Melissa Mark-Viverito, appointed weak, undistinguished representatives. Mayor de Blasio, who decisively halted the CLP, allowed his appointment to go unfilled for three and a half years; such are the vagaries of political power. Finally, in May of this year, de Blasio selected Jill Bright, who spent most of her career as an executive at Condé Nast. (Bright also declined to be interviewed for this article.)

The message is dishearteningly clear: Despite the fiascoes and failures at the NYPL between 2007 and 2014, the political leadership of New York City is allowing the library, which is partly funded by taxpayers, to regulate itself.

If the city won’t provide adequate oversight of the NYPL, then citizens will have to do it themselves. It won’t be a short-term project, nor will it be effortless. “The promise of greater openness in this institution,” says the CSNYPL’s Warren, “runs counter to a deeply embedded corporate culture.” I asked Princeton’s Katz, a leader of the coalition to save the NYPL, to reflect on his activism. “The governance of the NYPL needs to be changed,” he told me, “but there is little chance that any significant change is being contemplated. It was incompetence and arrogance that created the CLP crisis, and the underlying circumstances which permitted that near-debacle have not been eliminated.”

But Katz is far from dispirited. “We saved the stacks for the moment; we preserved the primary function—research—for the 42nd Street building; and we got the renovation of the Mid-Manhattan Library that we advocated for,” he says. “That is a lot, and it shows what citizen power can do, even in the New York City of the mega-wealthy. I feel good and proud every time I walk into the Rose Reading Room.”

In 1967, Sudisman, the general secretary of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), whose ranks had just been decimated in a series of massacres that left hundreds of thousands dead, was put on trial. Of the top five PKI leaders, Sudisman was the only one who appeared in court; the others were shot. Two foreigners were always present in the Jakarta courtroom: Benedict O’Gorman Anderson, a 30-year-old scholar of Indonesia, and Herbert Feith, a colleague of Anderson’s from Australia.

Amid the parade of Communist witnesses, only two of them spoke out in protest in the courtroom and refused to incriminate others. One was an old woman who subsequently went mad; the other, Anderson recalled many years later, “was this little Chinese kid who looked nineteen or twenty. Very calmly, and with great dignity, he gave his testimony. I was so impressed by it.”

Sudisman, who received a death sentence, also maintained his composure. In 2001, Anderson told me that he “was so dignified, so calm, and his speech was so great, that I felt a kind of moral obligation” to do something: “As Sudisman was leaving the courtroom for the last time, he looked at me and Herb. He didn’t say anything, but I had such a strong feeling that he was thinking: ‘You have to help us. Probably you two are the only ones I can trust to make sure that what I said will survive.’ It was like an appeal from a dying man.” Anderson answered that appeal in 1975, when he translated Sudisman’s speech into English from a smuggled copy of the court transcript. A radical printing collective in Australia published it as an orange-colored, 28-page pamphlet titled “Analysis of Responsibility,” with an admiring introduction by the translator.

After Sudisman’s trial, Anderson’s ability to do research in Java would eventually be curtailed. The young scholar, entirely fluent in Indonesian, was being watched: A US em­bassy document from 1967 stated that Anderson was “regarded…as an outright Communist or at least a fellow traveler.” He also found himself under attack in the Indonesian press: The magazine Chas, which reportedly had ties to the country’s intelligence services, called him a “useful idiot” in a front-page article. In April 1972, Anderson was expelled from the country. It was the beginning of an exile that would endure for almost three decades.

With Indonesia closed to him, Anderson journeyed to Bangkok in 1974. “It was a wonderful time to be there,” he later said. A heady interlude between dictatorships allowed Thai radicalism to flower. The good times ended in 1976, when the military overthrew the civilian regime and publicly shot and hanged student radicals in downtown Bangkok.

Still, the period Anderson spent in Thailand was essential to his intellectual growth, as it forced him to think comparatively—which, at the time, was rare among area-studies scholars. “Being in Thailand,” he later said, “forced me to think all the time about if I had to write about Thailand and Indonesia in one space, how would I do it?” Anderson, who died in Batu, Indonesia, in December at the age of 79, overcame that challenge, and the result was Imagined Communities (1983), a classic analysis of nationalism that has been translated into 29 languages.

* * *

In June 2001, when Anderson was 64, I traveled to upstate New York to profile him for Lingua Franca. He lived in Freeville, eight miles east of Ithaca, in a spacious old farmhouse surrounded by grazing cattle and with a barn topped by a Javanese-style weather vane. For three days, we sat and talked in a breezy kitchen packed with unruly stacks of crime novels, scholarly journals, Asian newspapers, and doctoral theses. Mounted on a wall was a striking black-and-white photograph of a youthful Sukarno, the left-wing nationalist who led Indonesia to independence in 1949 and was overthrown by General Suharto in 1967.

As I prepared to leave, I inquired if Anderson intended to write a memoir, and he said no. But two years later, an editor at a Japanese publishing house asked him for a small autobiographical volume. “Embarrassed rejection” was his initial response: “Professors in the West rarely have interesting lives. Their values are objectivity, solemnity, formality and—at least officially—self-effacement.” But when a special friend and former student, Kato Tsuyoshi, of Kyoto University, agreed to assist him with the book and then translate it into Japanese, Anderson consented. It was published, to his satisfaction, in Japan in 2009.

From the outset of the project, Benedict’s brother, the historian and critic Perry Anderson, urged him to publish the memoir in English, but he brushed the idea aside. In 2015, with his 80th birthday approaching, he changed his mind. Shortly before his death, Anderson completed the final draft of A Life Beyond Boundaries, which is now before us. It’s a neat and tidy book about his unusual trajectory and sensibility, infused with inside jokes, idiosyncratic asides, and sly humor. It is also a tart overview of academic life. But mostly the memoir is a primer for cosmopolitanism and an argument for traversing geographical, historical, linguistic, and disciplinary borders.

The history of the Anderson family reads like a Conrad novel. Benedict’s great-great-grandfather, along with a great-great-uncle, joined the United Irishmen Rebellion of 1798, for which they did time in prison. A nephew of theirs took part in the uprising of 1848, and thereafter fled to Paris, Istanbul, and, eventually, the United States, where he became a member of the New York State Supreme Court. Another branch of the family tree has Anglo-Irish landowners and military officers who served the British empire in Burma, Afghanistan, Hong Kong, and India.

Anderson’s intrepid, linguistically gifted father spent most of his career in China as an employee of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, which began as a tool of British and French imperialists and, in his son’s words, was responsible for taxing “imperial China’s maritime trade with the outside world.” Benedict was born in Kunming in 1936, but his father made a consequential decision in 1941 to move the family to California: Had they remained in China, they might have been imprisoned in a Japanese internment camp.

In 1945, the family moved to Ireland, where they lived in a house full of “Chinese scrolls, pictures, clothes and costumes, which we would often dress up in for fun.” The radio was another source of entertainment and enlightenment: In the evenings, the family listened to classic novels that were read aloud on the BBC by distinguished actors, “so that our imaginations were filled with figures like Anna Karenina, the Count of Monte Cristo, Lord Jim, Uriah Heep, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and so on.” In those years, traveling theater groups proliferated in Ireland, and the Anderson children (including Benedict’s sister Melanie) absorbed plays by Shakespeare, Shaw, Wilde, Sheridan, and O’Casey.

His father died young, when Benedict was 9, and the children were dispatched to boarding schools in England. His English mother, who was passionate about books and ideas, was scraping by on a pension, so Benedict had to win scholarships. He ended up garnering one of 13 vacant slots at Eton, a place that immediately sharpened his sense of class distinction. The scholarship boys lived in a separate dorm from the sons of the British aristocracy and had to wear a special “medieval” outfit. But he received an extraordinary old-fashioned education in literature, art history, ancient history, archaeology, and comparative modern history.

At the core of the curriculum was rigorous language study in Latin, Greek, French, German, and a bit of “Cold War Russian.” (Later, Anderson would learn Indonesian, Javanese, Thai, Tagalog, Dutch, and Spanish.) The memorization and recitation of poems in Latin and French were an essential aspect of his education; his teachers also asked him to translate English poems into Latin and even to compose poems in that language. Few students after him were educated in so rigorous a fashion. It was the end of an era.

Having flourished at Eton, Anderson found Cambridge University to be a tranquil holiday. He became enamored of film (Japanese cinema, especially) and felt the first stirrings of politicization. One afternoon during the Suez Crisis of 1956, he crossed the campus and saw a group of brown-skinned students demonstrating:

Suddenly, out of the blue, the protestors were assaulted by a gang of big English student bullies, most of them athletes. They were singing “God Save the Queen!” To me this was incomprehensible, and reprehensible.

The protestors, mostly Indians and Ceylonese, were much smaller and thinner, and so stood no chance.… I tried to intervene to help them, only to have my spectacles snatched off my face and smashed in the mud.

After graduating from Cambridge, Anderson lingered at home for six months, quarreling with his mother, who wanted him to become a British diplomat. An alternative presented itself when a friend invited him to work as a teaching assistant in Cornell University’s department of government. He arrived in Ithaca during a snowstorm in January 1958 and stayed there for the duration of his long, productive career.

* * *

The 1950s and ’60s were heady years to be a graduate student in Southeast Asian studies at Cornell: It and Yale were the only American universities with robust programs in that area. Money was plentiful, not only from the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, but also from the US government, which was keen to understand peasant rebellions and nationalist movements in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Anderson savored the intellectual excitement of toiling in a new field: “students felt like explorers investigating unknown societies and terrains.” His peers—some of whom were from Burma, Vietnam, and Indonesia—­literally built the Cornell Modern Indonesia Project, installing steel pillars to reinforce the rotting floors of the abandoned frat house where the program was located.

Some of the most pleasurable pages in A Life Beyond Boundaries feature finely etched, affectionate portraits of Anderson’s mentors. First among them was George Kahin, the savvy department chairman who was a specialist in Indonesia’s late-1940s struggles for independence from the Dutch, and whose sympathy for Indonesian nationalism would later result in the temporary revocation of his passport during the McCarthy years. Anderson writes that Kahin, who had participated in Quaker activism in defense of Japanese-­Americans in the 1940s, “formed me politically.” Another influence was Claire Holt, a Russian-speaking Jew from Latvia who, after working as a ballet critic in Paris and New York, moved to Indonesia and became the lover of the German archeologist Wilhelm Stutterheim, who shared her deep interest in Indonesia’s precolonial civilizations. Holt had no scholarly credentials, but Kahin brought her to Cornell to teach Indonesian languages to his graduate students. Anderson spent countless hours in her house, absorbing her extensive knowledge of traditional Javanese art, dance, and culture; sometimes they would read Russian poetry aloud to each other. “Claire Holt,” he writes, “was very special to me.”

Two other men, in the early days, were close to his heart. Harry Benda was a Czech Jew whose business career in Java was interrupted by the Japanese occupiers, who put him in an internment camp that nearly ended his life. Later, Benda made his way to Cornell, where he wrote a dissertation on the relationship between the Japanese and Muslims in prewar and wartime Indonesia. John Echols was a “perfect American gentleman” who knew a dozen languages and compiled the first English-language Indonesian dictionary. Anderson’s adoration of dictionaries derived from Echols: “Still today,” he writes, “the favorite shelf in my personal library is filled only with dictionaries of many kinds.”

Anderson was lucky not only in his mentors, but also in the loose institutional arrangements at Cornell that cemented his career: “Against normal recruitment rules—which require competitive candidacies, extensive interviews, and hostility to ‘nepotism’—I walked into an assistant professorship without any interviews and without any outside candidate being considered.”

Kahin, his principal mentor, had urged Anderson to undertake a dissertation on the Japanese occupation of Indonesia from 1942 to 1945, and the young scholar landed in Jakarta in December 1961. His first glimpse of the country was unforgettable: “I remember vividly the ride into town with all the taxi’s windows open. The first thing that hit me was the smell—of fresh trees and bushes, urine, incense, smoky oil lamps, garbage, and, above all, food in the little stalls that lined most of the main streets.” He would remain in Indonesia for almost two and a half years.

Jakarta was not yet a heaving, smog-filled megacity: There were few cars, and the various neighborhoods still had a distinct character. Foreigners were scarce. In contrast to the social hierarchies Anderson had observed in the UK and Ireland, he was immediately struck by the “egalitarianism” around him: He lived near a street where, after dark, men would play chess on the sidewalks, and he noticed that clerks and pedicab drivers would face off against high government officials and debonair businessmen. For the young Anderson, this was “a kind of social heaven.” The language came easily: His Indonesian took flight after four months, and he found that “without self-consciousness, I could talk happily with almost anyone—cabinet ministers, bus drivers, military officers, maids, businessmen, waitresses, schoolteachers, transvestite prostitutes, minor gangsters and politicians.” (His connection to the language deepened with the years: Anderson told me that he did much of his thinking in Indonesian.)

When Anderson wasn’t laboring in Jakarta’s archives, he got to know Java, wandering through the old royal palaces; attending performances of shadow plays and spirit possession; exploring the Borobudur, the Buddhist stupa built in the 10th century (once he slept till dawn on the stupa’s highest terrace “next to the Enlightened Ones”); and visiting tiny villages of the interior.

From the evidence of this memoir, Anderson, lost in the reveries of fieldwork and leisure, was largely unaware of the escalating political frictions that would soon cause Java to explode.

* * *

On October 1, 1965, six Indonesian generals were murdered and their bodies tossed down a well. The left-wing president, Sukarno, was detained; General Suharto took control and blamed the coup attempt on the PKI. It was the beginning of what Anderson would call “the catastrophe”—a series of massacres that, according to a CIA study from 1968, were comparable to the Soviet purges of the 1930s and the Nazi mass murders of World War II.

Anderson and two colleagues (Ruth McVey and Frederick Bunnell) observed these events from the safety of Ithaca. But they were determined to provide an intellectual response to the Indonesian calamity, and they immediately set out to prove that the official account was flawed. Relying on a vast cache of provincial Indonesian newspapers at Cornell, as well as Indonesian radio transcripts, the trio produced, in January 1966, a 162-page report that became known as the Cornell Paper.

The document, which took three months to write, insisted that the coup attempt was not a Communist power grab, but an “internal army affair” spearheaded by colonels from the province of Central Java. Kahin, who was always keen to push US foreign policy in a more humane direction, sent the Cornell Paper to Assistant Secretary of State William Bundy, and it soon found its way to Joseph Kraft, a syndicated columnist who disseminated the conclusions of the young Cornell scholars.

In my discussions with Anderson in 2001, he defended the main thrust of the Cornell Paper—that an intra-military dispute triggered the violence—and he spoke with immense passion, and in fascinating detail, about the events of 1965–66. Alas, much of what he related to me is absent from A Life Beyond Boundaries.

The PKI, he explained, had a parliamentary orientation that resembled the Italian Communist Party’s. In the early 1960s, he admired its nationalism, its incorruptibility, and its opposition to the Vietnam War. But the years had given him a clear-eyed sense of the PKI’s errors. It was completely unarmed, but it embraced the rhetoric of Maoism: “That was a huge mistake. It created fear and anxiety about the Communist Party. It wasn’t a guerrilla army. That’s why they were massacred; they were all out in the open.”

When the Indonesian government permitted Anderson to return to the country in 1999, he attended a meeting of those who had survived the terror of the 1960s. The meeting took place in a nondescript Jakarta building owned by the Ministry of Manpower; most of the attendees were elderly. He recalled it as “an incredibly overwhelming experience,” akin to a Quaker meeting, where people talked about their lives and experiences. When he took his seat, a buzz went around the room; the foreign scholar was persuaded to speak. Afterward, a dignified Chinese man who was around 50 approached him. Anderson realized that before him was the “kid” who, 32 years earlier, had challenged the judge at Sudisman’s trial in 1967. They spent a day together and Anderson heard his tale, which he related to me:

Many of the Communists, when they were trying to escape the sweeps on them, fled into the Chinese ghettos, partly because the Chinese are much more closemouthed than the Indonesians are, partly because these ghettos are accustomed to a certain level of clandestinity. And this kid, who was a radical kid, was somehow recruited by Sudisman to be his personal courier in terms of contacting other people who were hiding underground.

Is the Cornell Paper a work of lasting scholarship? Anderson insisted in 2001 that the events of October 1, 1965, were “manipulated from the top by General Suharto,” whom he considered the puppet master of the conspiracy. Contemporary scholars of the September 30th Movement—or G30S, as the plotters were known—have a different view. In a recent e-mail to me, University of British Columbia historian John Roosa, the author of the 2006 study Pretext for Mass Murder: The September 30th Movement and Suharto’s Coup D’État in Indonesia, noted:

I argued that Suharto knew about the plot beforehand but was not involved in it. From what is known I think it is clear that Suharto was not the mastermind. All Ben had was speculation. He speculated that Suharto, if not the mastermind, played the role of spoiler: Suharto had planted double-agents in the G30S group…who then sabotaged the plot, making sure that it committed an atrocity (killing the generals) and then collapsed. I think this is overreaching…. Ben also wanted to acquit the PKI of any involvement…. The argument of the Cornell Paper—­Javanese officers acting on their own—is completely wrong.

According to Roosa, top PKI leaders, including the chairman, D.N. Aidit, were deeply involved in the plot: “Aidit’s idea was to use military personnel who were loyal to the PKI to get rid of the army generals they suspected of being the key right-wing generals who were promoting anticommunism.” But matters went awry: “The initial plan seems to have been to capture the generals alive and present them to Sukarno, but the plotters didn’t carry out the plan with much concern for keeping the generals alive—three were shot or stabbed when they resisted being abducted.”

Given Anderson’s emotional connection to these events, one would expect that a memoir by him would contain a great deal about the “catastrophe.” But the carnage is evoked fleetingly and from a peculiar angle, in a brief passage about his comrade Pipit Rochijat Kartawidjaja, an Indonesian exile and “eternal student” in Berlin who, during the long Suharto dictatorship, clashed frequently and successfully with the “small, corrupt” Indonesian consulate in Berlin, effectively headed by an intelligence officer. Pipit, Anderson writes, is “an amazingly gifted and fearless satirical writer” whose articles are distinguished by “a mixture of formal Indonesian, Jakarta slang and Low Javanese,” a style that incorporated “Javanese wayang-lore, Sino-Indonesian kung-fu comic books, scatology and brazenly sexual jokes to make his friends laugh their heads off.”

Anderson, who credits Pipit with teaching him how to write fluently in Indonesian, translated one of his articles into English, an essay entitled “Am I PKI… or Non-PKI?,” which was based on incidents that Pipit had witnessed, as a young man, on a sugar estate in East Java in 1965. Pipit’s essay was full of black humor, but, Anderson says, “the horror haunted him”:

In his article he described how regular customers at the local brothel stopped going there when they saw the genitals of communists nailed to the door, and he recalled rafts piled high with mutilated corpses which floated down the Brantas river through the town of Kediri where he lived.

Writing at the end of his life, in a memoir that feels post-ideological, Anderson chose to accentuate the halcyon days in Java—the motorcycle trips through the interior, the sidewalk chess games, the full moon over Borobudur—instead of the ruination of a country he loved.

* * *

Anderson’s early work on Indonesia’s independence struggle of the 1940s led him to think seriously about nationalism: He saw how a skilled nationalist intelligentsia, based in Jakarta, had summoned not only a nation called Indonesia but also a new language, Indonesian, which became the language of resistance to the Dutch colonial rulers. Imagined Communities also grew out of the political realities in Southeast Asia following the Vietnam War. The book emerged from what Anderson viewed, in the early 1980s, as a “fundamental transformation in the history of Marxism and Marxist movements”: the wars between Vietnam, Cambodia, and China in 1978–79. Anderson simply couldn’t understand why Marxist regimes were fighting each other instead of the Western imperialists. It was a worrying spectacle: “I was haunted by the prospect of further full-scale wars between the socialist states.”

Anderson began a comprehensive study of nationalism, a force whose power and complexity were not explained by his sort of Marxist theory. In writing Imagined Communities, he was partly inspired by Tom Nairn’s The Break-up of Britain (1977), which, in Anderson’s words, had described the UK “as the decrepit relic of a pre-national, pre-republican age and thus doomed to share the fate of Austro-Hungary.” But Anderson strongly disagreed with Nairn’s contention that “‘nationalism’ is the pathology of modern developmental history, as inescapable as ‘neurosis’ in the individual.” Anderson argued that nationalism was neither a pathology nor a fixed, immutable force. Instead, he wrote, “it is an imagined political community…because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”

In an afterword to the 2006 edition of Imagined Communities, Anderson reflected on the book’s enormous success: “In the 1980s it was the only comparative study of nationalism’s history intended to combat Eurocentrism, and making use of non-European language sources. It was also the only one with a marked prejudice in favor of ‘small countries’”—Hungary, Thailand, Switzerland, Vietnam, Scotland, and the Philippines. Imagined Communities also broadly coincided with the rise of theory in the academy: It attempted to combine, he wrote in 2006, “a kind of historical materialism with what later on came to be called discourse analysis; Marxist modernism married to postmodernism avant la lettre.”

Anderson says in the memoir that he wanted to provoke his fellow scholars: “I deliberately brought together Tsarist Russia with British India, Hungary with Siam and Japan, Indonesia with Switzerland, and Vietnam with French West Africa…. These comparisons were intended to surprise and shock, but also to ‘globalize’ the study of the history of nationalism.”

What enabled him, in a learned fashion, to compare Hungary with Japan was a cast of mind that was always wide-ranging, endlessly curious, and interdisciplinary. When he surveys academic life, he sees thick disciplinary walls that breed narrow, provincial thinking. He tells us that, in his seminars on nationalism, he took pleasure in making students look outside their cubby holes:

I forced the young anthropologists to read Rousseau, political scientists a nineteenth-century Cuban novel, historians Listian economics, and sociologists and literary comparativists Maruyama Masao. I picked Maruyama because he was a political scientist, an Asian/Japanese, and a very intelligent man who read in many fields and had a fine sense of humour and history. It was plain to me that the students had been so professionally trained that they did not really understand each other’s scholarly terminology, ideology or theory.

He was also determined to steer them clear of jargon-filled writing, self-importance, and a reluctance (among American scholars) to learn difficult foreign languages. On the whole, he finds academia much too solemn, and likens professors to medieval monks determined to eradicate “frivolity.” As a student at Cambridge, he filled his papers with jokes, digressions, and sarcasm. In his early days at Cornell, he was immediately informed that “scholarship is a serious enterprise”—which made him reflect: “Now I understand what traditional Chinese foot-binding must have felt like.”

* * *

Anderson survived a heart attack in 1996 and retired from Cornell in 2001, after which he spent half of each year at his apartment in a lower-middle-class district of Bangkok—a zone, he told me, “full of small businesspeople, schoolteachers, mistresses of policemen, this sort of thing.” Liberated from his teaching and administrative duties, he threw himself into a number of projects: a book about anarchism and anti­colonial nationalisms, Under Three Flags (which, he says, has “mystified many readers”); a literary-political biography of Kwee Thiam Tjing, the Sino-Indonesian journalist and columnist whose work, Anderson believed, embodied the finest qualities of humanism and cosmopolitanism in early-20th-century Indonesia; and an effort of “amateurish anthropology,” The Fate of Rural Hell: Asceticism and Desire in Buddhist Thailand. He never lost his passion for literature, and helped to translate Man Tiger by the young Indonesian writer Eka Kurniawan, whose “novels and short stories are in a class of their own, far above all authors in Southeast Asia that I know,” and whose sensibility he compared to that of Gabriel García Márquez.

He continued to think about nationalism, which is “a powerful tool of the state and the institutions attached to it,” and which, in nations ranging from China to Pakistan to Sri Lanka, is “easily harnessed by repressive and conservative forces, which, unlike earlier anti- dynastic nationalisms, have little interest in cross-national solidarities.” He continued to reflect, too, on the fate of the left:

For a long time, different forms of socialism—anarchist, Leninist, New Leftist, social-democratic—provided a ‘global’ framework in which a progressive, emancipationist nationalism could flourish. Since the fall of ‘communism’ there has been a global vacuum, partially filled by feminism, environmentalism, neo-anarchism and various other ‘isms,’ fighting in different and not always cooperative ways against the barrenness of neoliberalism and hypocritical ‘human rights’ interventionism. But a lot of work, over a long period of time, will be needed to fill the vacuum.

Anderson tells us that A Life Beyond Boundaries has two principal themes: “The first is the importance of translation for individuals and societies. The second is the danger of arrogant provincialism, or of forgetting that serious nationalism is tied to internationalism.” He was heartened by the fact that, in area studies, many young Japanese are now learning Burmese; young Thais, Vietnamese; and Filipinos, Korean. Such students, he says, “are beginning to see a huge sky above them”:

It is important to keep in mind that to learn a language is not simply to learn a linguistic means of communication. It is also to learn the way of thinking and feeling of a people who speak and write a language which is different from ours. It is to learn the history and culture underlying their thoughts and emotions and so to learn to empathize with them.

His memoir concludes with a coda about memory, technology, and poetry, in which his prime target is Google: “Google is an extraordinary ‘research engine,’ says Google, without irony in its use of the word ‘engine,’ which in Old English meant ‘trickery’ (as is reflected in the verb ‘to engineer’) or even ‘an engine of torture.’” Anderson frets that future generations may never know the actual feel of a book: “Japanese books are bound one way, Burmese books another.” Groupthink rules: “The faith students have in Google is almost religious.”

As a student, he was enthralled by the cadence and rhymes of poems he had memorized, such as Rimbaud’s “dizzying ‘Le Bateau ivre.’” Today, search has supplanted memorization: “One effect of ‘easy access to everything’ is the acceleration of a trend that I had already noticed long before Google was born: there is no reason to remember anything, because we can retrieve ‘anything’ by other means.”

The poems he memorized in his youth stayed with him always. In 2007, he was invited to Leningrad to assist with a class on nationalism for young teachers in Russian provincial universities. Addressing them, he remembered some Russian from his days at Eton and proceeded to recite the final stanza of a poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky, who perished, amid murky circumstances, in Moscow in 1930. To his astonishment, all of the students joined with him:

Shine always,
Shine everywhere,
To the depth of the last day!
Shine—
And to hell with everything else!
That’s my motto—
And the sun’s!

“I was in tears by the end,” recalls Anderson. “Some of the students, too.”

When the New York Public Library abandoned its controversial renovation plan on May 7, we celebrated the power of journalism to shape policy and its ability to influence a progressive mayor who knows the importance of the city’s public institutions. In July 2011, we asked contributing writer Scott Sherman to profile the new president of the New York Public Library, Tony Marx. Sherman quickly discovered that the NYPL had embarked on a colossal plan to transform its main branch. The resulting article, “Upheaval at the New York Public Library,” published in December 2011, and his follow-up last September, “The Hidden History of New York City’s Central Library Plan,” sparked a major public debate. When candidate Bill de Blasio sought our mayoral endorsement, we challenged him to address the problems revealed by Sherman’s reporting. Activists drew on the reporting to bolster their ongoing organizing against the plan. Three months later, de Blasio spoke on the library steps, declaring that “these plans seemed to have been made without any forethought to the building’s historical and cultural integrity.” We congratulate Scott Sherman on his extraordinary investigation.—The Editors

It was a Bloomberg-era castle in the sky, born in secrecy, with Booz Allen Hamilton as the midwife. It was named the Central Library Plan (CLP), and as conceived by the trustees of the New York Public Library, it entailed the removal of 3 million books from the historic shelves beneath the Rose Reading Room at 42nd Street; the subsequent demolition of those shelves; and the insertion therein of a computer and circulating library designed by the British architect Norman Foster. How would the NYPL, which has been in financial distress for much of its history, pay for such a colossal undertaking? By selling two libraries situated on coveted pieces of city real estate: the Mid-Manhattan Library and the Science, Industry and Business Library. The Bloomberg administration, for its part, committed $150 million in capital funds for the project.

Opposition spread quickly, for obvious reasons. For one, the CLP was too expensive: the price tag was listed at $300 million, and the NYPL admitted it could run higher. The plan also neglected the needs of the system’s eighty-eight branch libraries (which require at least $500 million in repairs), and it allowed for the desecration of one of New York City’s architectural gems. The pressure and the scrutiny finally became intolerable: on May 7, the library’s president, Tony Marx, canceled the CLP. He made the right decision.

It is a defeat for the NYPL’s leadership, which worked aggressively to move the plan across the finish line. Marx was determined to begin construction last summer, while Bloomberg was still in office, but a pair of lawsuits filed by critics became an impediment. Undeterred, in the fall the NYPL paid $25,000 to a well-connected lobbyist whose task was to mobilize the Teamsters, construction unions, clergy and immigrant leaders on behalf of the renovation. Finally, in January the library sent a mailing to city residents, urging them, as it often does, to contact elected officials on behalf of greater library funding. But this mailing was underhanded—buried in the fine print was language supporting the renovation.

Three vibrant citizen groups deserve much of the credit for the demise of the CLP: the Committee to Save the New York Public Library, Citizens Defending Libraries, and the Library Lovers League, whose members worked around the clock for more than a year, and whose efforts prompted mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio to oppose the CLP at a July press conference held on the steps of the 42nd Street Library. Micah Kellner, a New York State assemblyman who held a public hearing in June 2013 at which Marx was peppered with tough questions, also deserves credit, as do two outstanding writers: Ada Louise Huxtable, whose stinging Wall Street Journal critique of the CLP in late 2012, “Undertaking Its Destruction,” was written from her deathbed; and New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman, who not only demolished the CLP on the front page of the Times in early 2013 but also kept the issue alive on Twitter and in his regular Times column.

While the trustees have lost the Battle of 42nd Street, they did achieve one central tenet of the CLP—the sale of the beloved Donnell Library on 53rd Street, across from the Museum of Modern Art, now the site of a forty-five-story luxury hotel and condominium. The NYPL collected $59 million for the property, a sum that one Manhattan real estate expert described as “suspiciously low.” The tower’s penthouse apartment has been advertised for $60 million. A much smaller NYPL branch library will reopen at the site next year, and the NYPL will spend $20 million to outfit it. The botched, clandestine sale of Donnell—its users were never informed of the deal until the building was about to be shuttered—remains a source of ire to many city residents. Elected officials need to examine the details of that sale.

Are the NYPL wars truly over? Four questions need immediate clarification. First, will Marx repair the decrepit Mid-Manhattan Library, or will he let it deteriorate even further so as to sell it down the road under a more developer-friendly mayor? Second, in 2013 the NYPL hastily removed 3 million books from the stacks in preparation for their demolition. The Wall Street Journal has reported that the stacks will remain empty, an unacceptable outcome for a building that was designed as a splendid machine for book storage and delivery. Marx should convene a public meeting in the library’s Celeste Bartos Forum to discuss the future of the stacks and the various alternatives for them. (He must also clarify how many books and photographs were damaged when the stacks were emptied.) Third, Norman Foster has already received $9 million for a design that was partly scrapped—a reckless disbursement of funds from a library system in chronic financial difficulty. Marx has refused to reveal the source of that money. Did it come from the NYPL, or from one or several of its trustees? Last, will the NYPL’s eighty-eight branch libraries, many of which are in poor neighborhoods, now receive the funds they need to flourish?

Intrinsic to these questions is the matter of transparency in governance at the NYPL, which is a remarkably closed institution. Throughout the entire controversy, it did not release a single internal financial document about the CLP, nor did it release a cost analysis for the renovation. The NYPL’s librarians were almost entirely excluded from the process, and not a single public meeting preceded the creation of the CLP in 2007. Under state law, the mayor, the comptroller and the speaker of the City Council are obligated to appoint ex-officio representatives to the NYPL’s board. Bloomberg’s representative was his sister, Marjorie Tiven. Mayor de Blasio, Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito and Comptroller Scott Stringer must appoint to the NYPL board independent voices who will bring sunlight to the internal proceedings and citizen accountability to one of the world’s greatest libraries.

In November 2011, The Nation revealed the details of a radical plan conceived by the board of trustees of the New York Public Library: the removal of 3 million books from seven levels of historic book stacks beneath the Rose Reading Room, the subsequent demolition of those stacks and the insertion therein of a modern computer library designed by the British architect Norman Foster. How would the NYPL pay for such an undertaking? By selling two of its nearby libraries to private interests. It was a Bloomberg-era scheme conceived in absolute secrecy by the trustees, with assistance from McKinsey & Co. and Booz Allen, which was paid $2.7 million. The NYPL’s librarians were almost entirely excluded from the process; and not a single public meeting preceded the creation of the plan in 2007.

Opposition spread quickly, for obvious reasons: the Central Library Plan was too expensive (the price tag was listed at $300 million; the NYPL admitted it could run higher); it neglected the needs of the NYPL’s eighty-seven branch libraries (which require at least $500 million to repair dilapidated facilities); and it entailed the mutilation of one of New York’s finest structures (“the whole building is a single architectural masterpiece,” one staff member told me in 2011. “The CLP would basically destroy half the library.”) The pressure became too much; today the library’s president, Tony Marx, announced that the CLP is being cancelled. He made the right decision.

It’s a defeat for an institution that, over the last year, worked aggressively to move the plan across the finish line. The NYPL was keen to begin construction last summer, with Michael Bloomberg still in office, but a pair of lawsuits filed by critics prevented that from happening.

The NYPL later paid $25,000 to a well-connected lobbyist whose task was to mobilize the Teamsters, construction unions, clergy and immigrant leaders on behalf of the renovation. Finally, it sent a dubious mass-mailing to city residents, urging them, as it often does, to contact elected officials on behalf of greater library funding. But the letter was sneaky—buried in the fine print was language supporting the renovation.

Credit for the NYPL retreat goes to the following: three vibrant citizen groups, the Committee to Save the NYPL, Citizens Defending Libraries and Library Lovers League, whose members worked around the clock for more than a year, and whose efforts prompted mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio to oppose the CLP at a July press conference in front of the Library; Micah Kellner, a New York State assemblyman who held a crucial public hearing in 2013 at which Marx received rough treatment, and who toiled behind the scenes to unearth details of the plan; and two exceptionally fine writers: Ada Louise Huxtable, whose stirring Wall Street Journal critique of the CLP was written from her deathbed; and New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman, who not only demolished the CLP on the front page of the Times in January 2013 but kept the issue alive on Twitter and his regular Times column.

Has the battle over the CLP truly ended? In an e-mail to his staff today, Marx declared: “No final decisions have been reached.” Four questions urgently need clarification: (1) it appears that the NYPL will retain the Mid-Manhattan Library, but will they fix it, or let it deteriorate even further, and sell it under a more business-friendly mayoral administration? (2) The NYPL hastily removed 3 million books from the stacks in 2013, in preparation for demolition; the stacks are now empty. Staff members say that because of the way the shelves were emptied, it will be extraordinarily difficult for the books to go back into the shelves that previously held them. Insiders also say that some books were damaged in the rapid removal process. Marx needs to tell us as soon as possible how many books were damaged. (3) The NYPL’s architect, Foster, has already received $7.9 million from the library for a design that was cancelled—an astonishingly reckless payment from a library system in chronic financial difficulty. But Marx, who leads an institution devoted to the dissemination of knowledge, won’t reveal the source of that money—did it come from the NYPL or one of its trustees? (4) Will the branch libraries, in a wealthy city, now get the funds they need to flourish?

One suspects that the de Blasio administration pushed the NYPL in the direction of cancelling the plan; let’s hope the Mayor and his team clarify the rest of the story soon.

On May 24, 2012, the University of Missouri System announced that it would close the University of Missouri Press so that it might focus more efficiently on “strategic priorities.” Admirers of the press mobilized rapidly to save it. “By abrupt fiat,” the author William Least Heat-Moon wrote in a local newspaper, the university “wants to eradicate a half-century of dedicated work in fostering, developing and publishing more than 2,000 books.” During a concert in Columbia, Missouri, Lucinda Williams lamented the closing of the press and defended its beleaguered staff. The New York Times and NPR covered the controversy, and 5,200 people signed a petition supporting the press. Four months later, the university reversed its decision. “Without question, the best news from the University of Missouri Press,” its editor in chief, Clair Willcox, recently wrote, “is that there is a University of Missouri Press.”

The Missouri case starkly illustrates a dual reality about the world of university press publishing—many university presses exist on the edge, and a large number of people want them to survive and flourish. Says Peter Berkery, the executive director of the Association of American University Presses (AAUP): “University presses are experiencing new, acute and, in some ways, existential pressures, largely from changes occurring in the academy and the technology juggernaut. Random House can see the technology threat and they can throw some substantial resources at it. The press at a small land-grant university doesn’t have the same ability to respond.”

“It is one of the noblest duties of a university to advance knowledge, and to diffuse it not merely among those who can attend the daily lectures—but far and wide.” So wrote Daniel Coit Gilman, the founder of Johns Hopkins University and its university press, which, established in 1878, is the oldest in the country. Gilman’s words appear in a 2002 essay about the history of university presses by Peter Givler, a former director of the AAUP. Givler notes that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many American university presidents had an enlightened understanding of the limits of commercial publishing: “To leave the publication of scholarly, highly specialized research to the workings of a commercial marketplace would be, in effect, to condemn it to languish unseen.”

In the intervening 136 years, the network of university presses has become a vibrant part of the publishing ecosystem. It encompasses giants such as Oxford University Press, which has fifty-two offices around the world, as well as Duquesne University Press, which specializes in medieval and Renaissance studies. University presses publish a vast range of scholarship, but they also publish a dizzying array of books that are unlikely to find a home at Manhattan’s large commercial publishers. Consider some recent offerings: Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen’s An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions (Princeton); Rebecca Solnit and Rebecca Snedeker’s Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas (California); Two Prospectors: The Letters of Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark (Texas), edited by Chad Hammett; and Warren Hoffman’s The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical (Rutgers). University presses don’t just publish books: they keep books in print and rescue out-of-print books from obscurity. Thanks to the University of Minnesota Press, there is an attractive new edition of Gary Giddins’s Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker (1986). “People sometimes dismiss university press publications as low-selling, but that underestimates their cultural importance and influence,” says Doug Armato, director of the University of Minnesota Press. “When you look at the endnotes of bestselling serious books—Robert Caro’s biographies of Lyndon Johnson are a good example—you see how much they are built on work published by university presses.” And occasionally there is a runaway success: Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is published by Harvard University Press.

But the digital age complicates and threatens the mission of the country’s approximately 100 university presses. Ellen Faran, who has an MBA from Harvard and is the director of MIT Press, recently told Harvard Magazine: “I like doing things that are impossible, and there’s nothing more impossible than university-press publishing.”

* * *

The postwar era, after Sputnik in particular, was the golden age for university presses. President Eisenhower’s National Defense Education Act directed a massive influx of money into universities, and much of it flowed into the budgets of university libraries, which purchased sizable numbers of university press books and journals.

The good times didn’t last long. In 1970, university libraries began to purchase fewer monographs, a trend that has accelerated through the years. The directors and editors with whom I spoke say that, ten to fifteen years ago, they could sell 1,000 copies of a monograph to academic libraries. These days, they can count on monograph sales of only 300 to 400 copies. Every university press has felt this loss, and some have never recovered.

Another setback in the 1960s and 1970s was the rise of large publishing conglomerates such as Elselvier, Springer and Wiley, which aggressively expanded their acquisition of science journals. This is a fact of considerable importance: subscriptions to science journals are expensive (a one-year subscription to Brain Research costs $19,952), so academic libraries have had to devote considerable financial resources to retain them, and that has diminished their budgets for humanities and social science monographs. In Books in the Digital Age (2005), the Cambridge sociologist John B. Thompson explains that “in 1997 journals were thirty times more expensive than they were in 1970,” and the trend shows no signs of changing.

The presses tried to combat the fall in monograph sales; some of them moved aggressively into regional publishing, producing books about local history and culture. Thompson notes that the University of North Carolina Press pioneered this approach, with one of its standouts being a cookbook called Mama Dip’s Kitchen, which has sold 233,000 copies. But for reasons of scale, university presses can’t easily compete with commercial publishers.

Their disadvantage has been exacerbated by the digital revolution, which brought in Amazon and the decline of bookstores; the advent of e-books; and the changing reading habits of scholars, many of whom want access to a wide range of digital tools as well as the old-fashioned print monograph. All of this has put enormous strain on university presses. A further source of anxiety has been the steady decline in sales of new course books, as college students increasingly buy used books on the web. Underneath it all, the erosion of the humanities and the social sciences—the focus of most university presses—has contributed to a feeling of uncertainty among press directors.

Most university presses are dependent on subsidies from their home institutions. But the AAUP’s Peter Berkery notes that the corporatization of the academy has led to “increased scrutiny of university press subventions” from universities. Most presses receive annual subsidies that tend to range from $150,000 to $500,000, while a handful of presses, such as Yale, Princeton and Harvard, enjoy the feathery cushion of an endowment.

Some university press directors have known nothing but strain; for them, the sky is always falling, and the digital age is just the latest in a long series of challenges. Says MaryKatherine Callaway, director of Louisiana State University Press (which has won four Pulitzer Prizes): “When you look at university press catalogs from the 1930s and 1940s and compare them to later decades and then to current catalogs, you notice that there have always been deep transitions within university press publishing. We have undergone huge shifts more than once, and the business likely did not feel any more stable to a press director in 1973 than it does in 2014.”

Others view the digital revolution as a decisive rupture with the past. “The digital system…will bring with it fundamental (and many unforeseen and unforeseeable) transformations not only in how and where scholars communicate what they know, but also in what they know, in how they know, and in the ways in which they know,” Phil Pochoda, former director of the University of Michigan Press, wrote in a 2012 essay in New Media & Society. “In the language of seismologists, this is truly ‘the big one.’”

* * *

In the press release announcing the closure of its press, the University of Missouri System insisted that it would continue to engage in scholarly publishing. But the release was laden with euphemisms, suggesting that the university came close to extinguishing the press without having anything substantial with which to replace it. The university “is exploring dramatically new models for scholarly communication, building on its strengths in journalism, library science, information technology, the libraries, and its broad emphasis on media of the future,” the press release declared. “Much editorial work would be done by students who would work under supervision of faculty.”

Vague pronouncements of this sort are immensely irritating to university press directors. “There’s this idea,” says Peter Dougherty, the director of Princeton University Press, “that scholarship should sort itself out spontaneously over the Internet, and that all of the various institutions that we used to associate with the publication of scholarship will somehow reformulate themselves on the web, and that all costs will disappear as if by magic. Maybe that’s true, but a life in the editorial fray tells me that it’s not.”

The debates and discussions unfolding today in the world of university press publishing are complex and wide-ranging. The establishment position is represented by the AAUP, and it amounts to this: a digital transition is necessary and inevitable; the university press sector is doing it as fast and efficiently as it can; but the presses lack the economic resources to innovate and shouldn’t risk smashing the fine china by pushing ahead recklessly. That incrementalist view is reflected in a 2011 AAUP report, “Sustaining Scholarly Publishing,” written by the directors of the following university presses: California, Duke, MIT, Chicago, Kent State and Massachusetts. The report notes that the old model of books on paper is certainly under strain, but it’s a model that is still responsible for most of the revenue for university presses. Today, books on paper constitute 85 to 97 percent of their total revenue, compared with 3 to 15 percent from e-books.

The presses are pushing forward with e-books, but these pose a challenge for the sector. “For two decades, we’ve been ‘just around the corner’ from a universal format for digital publications,” the AAUP report noted, and “perhaps the most complex problem is setting the level of quality assurance and proofreading that is necessary for every format, since a PDF is a different representation than a reflowable EPUB in an iBookstore, or the same book on a Kindle.” (Some press directors feel pressure from their university patrons to move rapidly into e-books, and complain that the administrators making those demands don’t understand the complexities and high cost of the e-book market.)

Then there is the matter of Open Access—a movement that, according to Peter Suber, director of the Harvard Open Access Project, entails this basic idea: “make research literature available online without price barriers and without most permission barriers.” Today, the demand for Open Access is strongest in the realm of science publishing, but the university presses are also feeling some pressure from OA advocates. It’s a model that a handful of institutions, such as the RAND Corporation and the National Academies Press, have successfully adopted. But the AAUP report doesn’t see OA as a viable model for the entire sector. RAND—whose clientele, the report notes, includes “government agencies, foundations and private-sector firms”—is simply wealthier than most of the presses in the AAUP universe, and it has the luxury to be innovative. (RAND’s site contains nearly 20,000 PDF files—books, monographs, reports and briefs—available for free download.) The AAUP report concludes that “no single new business model will replace the traditional print-based model. Rather, a mix of revenue sources will be required to sustain scholarly publishing in the future.”

Not everyone is satisfied with the AAUP’s incrementalist approach; some think the presses need to move faster and with much greater urgency into the digital future. Phil Pochoda, who wrote the lead article for a special issue of The Nation on university presses in 1997, thinks books will inevitably be superseded by burgeoning digital technologies. “The AAUP should recognize,” Pochoda said in a recent interview, “that the individual presses, even the largest ones, do not begin to have the scale or the resources to develop the digital systems necessary to compete in the digital publishing era. The AAUP should take the lead in calling for a national effort—involving interested foundations, university administrations, IP centers, libraries and many other kinds of campus-based digital venues—to develop a publishing process that coordinates university press resources with many new publishing channels.”

Alison Mudditt, director of the University of California Press, is another critic of the incrementalist approach. In 2012, Mudditt delivered some blunt remarks to her AAUP colleagues at a meeting in Charleston, South Carolina: “We are often ignorant of the world of commercial scholarly publishing,” she said, “and at our worst we are dismissive of it, whether through fear or a misplaced sense of superiority.” A few weeks ago, Mudditt described the challenges of trying to sustain an old business—in her case, one based on a vibrant list of print books—while trying to build a brand-new digital business at her press. “We’ve set up a separate business development unit that is deliberately running in parallel to the rest of the organization, but is free from the structures and the meetings,” she says. “It’s really set up to help us figure out this digital business.” Mudditt notes that she is fortunate enough to lead a large press that has significant resources for digital experimentation.

A much-discussed trend in the university press sector, especially among smaller presses, is the growing power of academic librarians. In the past, press directors generally reported to the university provost; now, at least nineteen press directors report to the head of the university library. “Provosts are busy and sometimes would rather delegate the press,” says a university librarian, who adds that “research libraries command significant financial and expertise resources, which can be applied to the work of the press.” In some cases, such as Purdue University Press, it appears to be working out well. “By integrating the press into the libraries, Purdue University is creating a center of scholarly communication expertise on campus,” says Charles Watkinson, Purdue’s director. “Quite apart from the reduced overhead achieved through sharing support services, the merged entity has the skills and infrastructure to be able to effectively serve the full spectrum of publishing needs that scholars have in the digital age—linked data, multimedia, etc.”

Watkinson has his own critique of what went awry in his profession. He contends that, in recent years, certain presses have allowed their ties to their own universities to fray, and are now paying a high price for that neglect. “Many university presses, especially smaller ones, did not do themselves a service by attempting to fly beneath the radar at their institutions,” Watkinson says. “Focusing just on academic disciplines and not serving their university community was not a good strategy. If a university press is subsidized by its parent institution, it should expect to give something tangible back. That can range from explicitly aligning the publishing list with the institution’s disciplinary strengths to providing additional publishing services outside the press’s imprint.” Purdue University Press, for instance, now manages a technical report series for the university’s School of Civil Engineering.

But there are reasons to be skeptical about the ability of librarians to run university presses. For one, some of them loathe the presses and their output. In 2007, Ithaka, a nonprofit organization that assists the academic world with digital issues, published a major report titled “University Publishing in a Digital Age.” The report was based on interviews with dozens of press directors, provosts and librarians at the most prestigious institutions. The individual quotes were unattributed, but the names of the interviewees were printed in the back of the report. Some of the language from the university librarians was remarkably hostile to the presses. “Most of the presses will die,” one librarian said. “They’ve clung to the past; they’re too traditional; they’re too afraid of big competitors.” A second declared: “The presses are not totally broken, but by the time it is clear that they are broken, it will be too late.” A third opined: “Presses are trapped in the cage of ‘What can I do to make money?’ and they have so few resources to climb out of that cage. They are like hamsters scrabbling along and pushing their little wheels.”

No wonder some university press directors are concerned about the rising clout of campus librarians, many of whom are far more enthusiastic about Open Access publishing than press directors tend to be. Says Peter Dougherty of Princeton University Press, “I know what an art it is to publish scholarly books: to attract them, to build a list, to get them edited, to present them to an editorial board, to design them, to get them reviewed—to do all the things you need to do to offer them to the world so they can do what they are supposed to do, which is to help inform a discussion and a conversation.” Indeed, it’s too vital a task to be entrusted solely to university librarians.

University press watchers are concerned about the fate of two presses in the Midwest. In 2012, Indiana University Press was merged into an Office of Scholarly Publishing, where librarians have considerable influence, while the University of Michigan Press is fully under control of that university’s library. Both presses currently lack a director as the search process continues.

* * *

A crucial question faces university presses and the universities themselves: Who will pay for the dissemination of scholarship? University presses provide a number of vital functions for the academy as a whole—starting with the fact that, by and large, young professors achieve promotion and tenure based on monographs they publish. But the funding for the entire system is lopsided. If the University of Colorado Press publishes a monograph by a young professor at Dartmouth that enables that scholar to obtain tenure, then the University of Colorado Press, with its very modest budget, is in effect subsidizing Dartmouth, which has an endowment of $3.7 billion as well as its own small press. In his New Media & Society essay, Pochoda noted that approximately 100 university presses are subsidizing “at least 1,000 other universities and colleges who are free riders on a system that they rely on but do not support.”

Some directors would like to see the universities do much more to assist the presses. Says Doug Armato of Minnesota: “The responsibility lies with the universities themselves to recognize that presses play a critical role not just within academia, but the culture as a whole. They also need to recognize that books and knowledge have as dedicated a constituency as do the college sports teams in which they invest significant resources and pride. It costs approximately $100,000 a year to support a college athlete; dissemination of a faculty member’s research could be effectively sponsored at a tenth of that cost or less.” Other university press editors simply want university libraries to do what they did in the golden age: buy more university press books alongside the costly science journals.

But a systemic solution may be needed. As the authors of the 2007 Ithaka report concluded, “there [is] a strong sense that a new third-party enterprise or at least a catalytic force is needed to: facilitate the investment of capital; lead the community toward a shared vision of the scholarly communications landscape; help institutions find their place in that new system; marshal the necessary ongoing resources; and help motivate collaboration both within campuses and across institutions.”

Who might spearhead such a task? The Mellon Foundation has devoted significant energy and resources to the support of university press publishing; it funded Project Muse, an initiative that manages and sells peer-reviewed digital content worldwide from a consortium of 200 not-for-profit publishers. But the foundations won’t save the presses. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, university leaders were enlightened enough to establish university presses. Perhaps now their duty is to sustain and protect them. The combined endowments of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, Columbia and Michigan total more than $100 billion. The presses have been on a very tight leash for a long time; they need fresh air and money. The elite universities should provide it. They could assist the presses with the expensive transition to digital publishing; they could increase library budgets to enable university press books to flow more readily into the libraries; they could facilitate the hiring of top talent. They should be the catalytic force for the greater good of university presses and their readers.

On December 12, in a decision formulated behind closed doors, the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation & Historic Preservation green-lighted the New York Public Library’s request to demolish seven levels of book stacks inside the main branch of the 42nd Street Library. But first, the corpse must be prepared for burial: before proceeding with the demolition, the NYPL was instructed to hire an archaeologist or historian to document, via photography and archival evidence, the stacks designed by Carrère and Hastings, which were hailed as marvels of engineering when they were unveiled in 1911.

This is a wake-up call for New York’s new mayor, Bill de Blasio, who held a press conference on the steps of the NYPL on July 12 to declare his opposition to the Central Library Plan (CLP), which also entails the sale of the bustling Mid-Manhattan Library to private interests.

The same day, de Blasio—then still a candidate—sent a letter registering his concerns to the sitting mayor, Michael Bloomberg. In it, he urged Bloomberg to “seriously consider alternative ways to…ensure the preservation of the NYPL’s valuable collection stored at the Central Library and preserve the Mid-Manhattan branch as a functioning library.”

De Blasio was right to speak out: the CLP devotes immense resources to the central library, in the heart of Manhattan, while ignoring the needs of the NYPL’s nearly 100 branch libraries, many of which are situated in poor, outlying zones of the city. Those branch libraries need at least $500 million in structural renovations.

How should the new mayor proceed? He should redirect the $150 million in capital funds the Bloomberg administration allocated to the CLP. A portion of that money should be used to upgrade the ventilation system in the stacks, which, until recently, held 3 million books. (All of the books must be returned to the stacks.) Some of the money should be given to the branch libraries. The rest could revitalize the Mid-Manhattan Library—an idea put forth by architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable in her final published essay: “Let Foster+Partners loose on the Mid-Manhattan building; the results will be spectacular, and probably no more costly than the extravagant and destructive plan the library has chosen.”

]]>https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/time-running-out-mayor-bill-de-blasio-halt-new-york-public-librarys-disastrous-renova/https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/hidden-history-new-york-citys-central-library-plan/Scott Sherman,Scott Sherman,Scott Sherman,Scott Sherman,Scott Sherman,Scott Sherman,Scott Sherman,Scott ShermanAug 28, 2013Why did one of the world’s greatest libraries adopt a $300 million transformation without any real public debate?

The main entrance to the New York Public Library in New York. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)

“There is no more important landmark building in New York than the New York Public Library…. Yet it is about to undertake its own destruction.” So wrote architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable in her final essay before she died (at the age of 91) on January 7. That essay, which appeared in The Wall Street Journal, was one of two luminous pieces of criticism published in the winter concerning the NYPL’s Central Library Plan. Huxtable decried the library’s lack of transparency: three phone calls she made to the institution this past August were not returned until a powerful city official intervened on her behalf. As for the CLP, Huxtable arrived at a stark conclusion: “After extensive study of the library’s conception and construction I have become convinced that irreversible changes of this magnitude should not be made in this landmark building…. You don’t ‘update’ a masterpiece.”

Eight weeks later Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic for The New York Times, took a sledgehammer to the CLP, reminding the NYPL’s leaders that “the last thing they’d want to be remembered for is trashing their landmark building and digging a money pit,” and urging them to unleash their architect, Norman Foster, on the tumbledown building across the street, the Mid-Manhattan Library, which the NYPL is determined to sell for approximately $100 million [see Sherman, “Upheaval at the New York Public Library,” December 19, 2011].

Those impassioned arguments were not enough to derail the CLP, the cost of which could reach as high as $350 million. But those funds would be more wisely spent on the NYPL’s eighty-seven branch libraries in Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island, which need approximately $800 million in renovations, including elevator rehabilitation; new roofs, boilers and windows; and fire alarms. At a recent City Council hearing, NYPL president Anthony Marx declared that some of those branch libraries are “shocking…an insult to the citizens of New York.” A few hours after Kimmelman’s article appeared in print, Marx championed the CLP in an interview with WNYC radio, during which he reiterated the very claims the two critics had already demolished.

In its quest to alter the Forty-second Street library and sell off real estate assets, the NYPL in January moved two steps closer to its goal. On January 17, the local community board, CB5, passed a pro-CLP resolution, the wording of which bore a suspicious likeness to the NYPL’s press information and talking points. On January 22, the Landmarks Preservation Commission, by a vote of 6 to 2, gave the NYPL a green light for a handful of exterior alterations the library had requested for Forty-second Street. The hearing had a scripted quality: the small changes approved by the commission enable and set in motion colossal changes to the interior, including the demolition of seven levels of stacks beneath the Rose Reading Room, which were designed by Carrère and Hastings. Alas, the stacks are not landmarked, and their fate did not stir the six commissioners. In February, the NYPL’s chief operating officer, David Offensend, told the trustees, “We are still on track to begin construction this summer.”

The NYPL is not the only New York City library under criticism. In January, the Brooklyn Public Library (which is separate from the NYPL) revealed that in the wake of diminishing financial support from the city, it intends to sell two branch libraries to real estate developers: a 1962 building in upscale Brooklyn Heights (for which the BPL could get up to $100 million) and a sturdy Beaux-Arts building in a gentrifying section of downtown Brooklyn, constructed in 1904. A SignOn.org petition—directed at the BPL and the NYPL and lamenting the “shrinking [of] our library system to create real estate deals for the wealthy”—has been signed by more than 9,000 people.

The NYPL’s lack of transparency is just one worrisome aspect of the current controversy. Another is the willingness of its president, Marx, to put forth dubious assertions—that millions of books are “rotting” in the Forty-second Street stacks, where there are “almost no preservation values”; that the stacks are a fire hazard; that the CLP will generate “about $15 million a year”; that the plan “has been the subject of public discussion for five years.” In his Timesessay, Kimmelman urged the
NYPL to provide, before any contracts are signed, a “clear and open accounting of both its plan and some alternatives,” as well as a “detailed cost analysis by at least one independent party.” We are still waiting for all those things; the fact that much of the CLP ($150 million) will be paid for by taxpayers adds urgency to Kimmelman’s demand. Public libraries are not oil companies or banks; they exist to disseminate information, and it’s disheartening to see the world-class NYPL hoarding data that belong in public hands.

But Marx wants to rush to the finish line: he admitted in a 2012 letter to scholars that the next mayor and City Council may not embrace the CLP, and that demolition at Forty-second Street must therefore commence while Michael Bloomberg is still mayor. Huxtable and Kimmelman, as well as the writer Caleb Crain, have put a less expensive compromise solution on the table—allow Foster to renovate the Mid-Manhattan Library (“the results will be spectacular,” Huxtable wrote) and let a landmark remain a landmark. In an April 11 letter to Marx, Charles Warren, co-author of a book on Carrère and Hastings, wrote: “I urge you to open this process to wider debate. Alternatives must be examined by independent experts and all options considered publicly before one of our greatest buildings is incapacitated and the books are sent away forever. If instead, you keep to a closed, narrowly determined course, we will all soon regret the result.”

View Scott Sherman’s previous articles on the NYPL here and here.

Columbia University. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

In May 1943, James B. Conant, the president of Harvard University, published an essay in The Atlantic Monthly titled “Wanted: American Radicals.” Conant was on the lookout for “a group of modern radicals in the American tradition,” whose ideas would encompass Thoreau and Whitman, Emerson and Marx, and who would be “lusty in wielding the axe against the root of inherited privilege” so as to prevent the growth of “a caste system.” His proposal? The imposition of “really effective inheritance and gift taxes and the breaking up of trust funds and estates.” Conant, whose essay infuriated Harvard’s well-heeled trustees, was hardly a radical himself; he was, and would always remain, a man of the establishment. But in those days, college and university presidents did not limit their activities to fundraising, shmoozing, paper-pushing and administration. They had access to bully pulpits, and they occupied them.

Think about it: When was the last time a college or university president produced an edgy piece of commentary, or took a daring stand on a contentious matter?

It’s a familiar lament. The university president, Upton Sinclair wrote in The Goose-Step, was “the most universal faker and the most variegated prevaricator that has yet appeared in the civilized world.” William Honan, writing in The New York Times in 1994, wondered why college presidents no longer “cut striking figures on the public stage.” “Small Men on Campus: The Shrinking College President” was the headline of a New Republic cover story in 1998. In their 2010 book Higher Education?, Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus declared, “Once upon a time, university leaders were seen as sculptors of society.” Now they “are chiefly technocrats, agile climbers who reach the top without making too many enemies or mistakes.”

Recently the old concerns about higher education leadership were revived by controversies concerning two Ivy League presidents: Ruth Simmons of Brown and Lee Bollinger of Columbia. Not so long ago, both were seen as public-spirited, visionary leaders: Bollinger, when he led the University of Michigan, spearheaded the fight for affirmative action in college admissions; and Simmons, in 2003, initiated a far-reaching investigation into Brown’s historic connection to slavery and the slave trade. (She stepped down last year.)

Those actions won praise, but serious questions have since been raised about what these people do in their spare time. In 2010, the Times reported that Simmons had served on the board of Goldman Sachs and was partly responsible for a $68 million pay package awarded to its chairman, Lloyd Blankfein, in 2007. (Simmons ultimately left the Goldman Sachs board with stock worth $4.3 million.) In June, Bollinger, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s board of directors, defended the right of Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, to remain a member of that same board, despite the fact that Dimon’s bank had contributed money to Columbia. Those who thought Dimon should resign, Bollinger reportedly said, were “foolish.” Criticism came quickly: economist Simon Johnson, in blog posts for the Times, lashed Bollinger for serving on the Fed’s board, for sidestepping an obvious conflict of interest and for lacking the credentials to serve. (Bollinger’s term ended December 31.)

Why should we fret about the presidents of our colleges and universities? Because American higher education is plagued by severe difficulties on many fronts—from soaring tuition and runaway student debt to the loss of public funding, the endemic corruption in college athletics and the erosion of the liberal arts—and the presidents won’t resolve those issues by kibitzing in the gilded suites of Wall Street. The time has come to demand more from them, and to hold them to more elevated standards. The finest presidents of the past—Conant, Robert Hutchins, Kingman Brewster, Clark Kerr—were not perfect men, but they exercised potent leadership, and sometimes they were quite courageous.

* * *

In the late 1970s, shortly after he took over Bard College, Leon Botstein paid a visit to the president of Yale, A. Bartlett Giamatti. “I was in his office,” Botstein recalls, “and I was so impressed and filled with envy. I said, ‘Boy, you have a really great job.’ And he looked at me and said, ‘You’re not as smart as I thought you were. I can’t do anything in this job. You have a great job. You actually might be able to get something done.’ ”

Given the nature of the job, one would think it’s a position few would aspire to. “The university president in the United States,” former University of California president Kerr wrote in The Uses of the University, “is expected to be a friend of the students, a colleague of the faculty, a good fellow with the alumni, a sound administrator with the trustees…a devotee of opera and football equally, a decent human being, a good husband and father, an active member of a church.”

But the job has changed radically in recent decades, and these days we have a generation of presidents who tiptoe around public controversy. “We now think of the president as the CEO of a very large corporation,” says Stanley Katz, a higher education expert at Princeton. “That’s how we justify paying these people so much. Top-earning university presidents make up to $3 million,” which, he says, “would have been inconceivable to James B. Conant. He wouldn’t have wanted it.” Structural changes in universities have irrevocably altered the job. “We have created money-eating machines,” says Katz. “They consume finances so fast that it’s virtually a full-time job of a university president to raise money. That simply wasn’t the case in Conant’s era.”

In Conant’s day, presidents were expected, first and foremost, to provide educational and intellectual leadership at their own institutions. But that aspect of the job has eroded. In the mid-1990s, Katz assisted a major Southern university in its search for a president. Another member of the search committee, a professor, asked the candidate, “What is your educational vision?” That person, who eventually got the president’s job, replied, “I don’t have an educational vision. That’s the job of a provost.”

Hunter Rawlings is the president of the Association of American Universities (AAU), in Washington, which represents sixty-two leading research institutions. Rawlings formerly served as president of the University of Iowa and Cornell University, where, in 2005, he delivered a blunt speech assailing the “intelligent design” movement; he got a standing ovation. Rawlings agrees with Katz that presidents are increasingly handcuffed by fundraising and administration. In the age of the “enormous megaversity,” he says, universities comprise “all kinds of businesses: hospitals, very large medical schools, sports franchises, overseas operations. Institutions such as Harvard, Yale, Penn, Columbia—they’re all now large property owners in their neighborhoods. The position of president, then, has to be somewhat more managerial than it used to be. We are talking about institutions with budgets of three, four, five billion dollars a year.” The presidents, as a result, “are somewhat inhibited by the demands of the office—by the need not to offend folks in different quarters.”

Not every recent president has abdicated the bully pulpit. “Larry Summers spoke out a lot while he was president of Harvard,” says Henry Bienen, who led Northwestern University from 1995 to 2009. “He may be a good reason why [presidents] have stopped being so outspoken.” (In 2005, Summers raised questions about the ability of women to excel in science and 
math and lit a firestorm.) But Bienen insists that today’s presidents have not abdicated their public role, nor have they abandoned the bully pulpit. What has changed, he says, is that presidents choose to focus on matters “close in to higher education” and K–12 education—a trend he approves. He mentions the Chicago public schools, where he is one of seven board members appointed by the mayor, and the efforts of outgoing Yale president Richard Levin to push for changes to US visa policy, which, since 9/11, has restricted the ability of foreign students and professors to work here. But are the presidents making a difference in educational policy? Says Rawlings of the AAU: “Yes, many presidents are engaged in that kind of a discussion, but not in a way, I think, that makes a lot of impact on the political scene. In this last presidential campaign, you didn’t hear many university presidential voices contributing to debate and discussion.”

Bienen concedes that pressure from trustees, who do the all-important work of hiring presidents, shapes and limits the extent to which they can function in a public capacity. A president who wishes to raise vital questions about climate change, foreign policy or taxation may find it hard to do so: “I don’t think their boards have wanted it,” says Bienen. “On the whole, the trustee view is: you should be speaking out on those issues that are close in to the university, and there are plenty of them.”

* * *

That view is echoed by distinguished experts on the college presidency. William Bowen was the president of Princeton from 1972 to 1988, after which he spent eighteen years as head of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Bowen, 79, is the opposite of a university bureaucrat: for decades he has used quantitative data and calm, diplomatic reasoning to advocate for affirmative action in admissions and for the reform of college athletics. One of the central arguments Bowen imparts in his recent book, Lessons Learned: Reflections of a University President, is this: be careful. “It is, I think, quite remarkable how willing public bodies in this country, and alumni, have been to tolerate the criticism and dissension that emerge from campus communities,” Bowen writes. “This willingness to accept the vigorous exercise of academic freedom is dependent on evidence of institutional restraint on the part of universities and their presidents.”

Restraint was the theme of our recent conversation at the Mellon Foundation. When I asked Bowen to respond to Hacker and Dreifus’s declaration about campus leaders, he swatted it away like a gnat. “The job of the president is not to pronounce on the big public issues of today,” Bowen says. “The job of the president is to pronounce on educational issues and to lead the academy. It’s a mistaken conception to think of the president of any of these places as a surrogate for the governor of the state, the senator or the president. That only causes trouble and does damage, because what it does is impose a seeming orthodoxy on an institution that ought to be the home of the unorthodox.” Bowen insists that presidents should measure every word they utter in public: “You ought to have the brain and the judgment to keep your mouth shut when you don’t know anything about the issue.”

Fair enough—but aren’t those views somewhat timorous and risk-averse, especially in light of the manifold pressures on higher education? Bowen replies that for a president to defend, say, affirmative action in a politically divided society is hardly risk-averse. But isn’t affirmative action a prevailing ideology in higher education? “In many educational settings,” says Bowen, “the key constituents—alumni, faculty, students, as well as trustees and in some cases legislators—are overwhelmingly in favor of aggressive pursuit of diversity and of affirmative action. But in other educational contexts, where key constituencies are more conservative, being vocally in favor of affirmative action can take courage.”

The way Bowen frames the issue of presidential engagement does not satisfy everyone I talked with. “I think almost any issue is fair game,” says Sanford Ungar, president of Goucher College, who has urged his peers to “abandon blandness” and stand up for “empiricism, reason, and calm debate.” “Global warming, for instance, is a matter of science versus ignorance,” says Ungar. “If a president is intimidated out of standing up for science against ignorance, that’s pretty sad.”

* * *

A few presidents have a grittier and more expansive view of their job. I recently met Nancy Cantor, the departing chancellor of Syracuse University, in an elegant brownstone the university owns, donated by a philanthropist, on the edge of New York’s Central Park. Cantor has staked her reputation on a bold and unusual plan she spearheaded called the Near Westside Initiative to transform decaying sections of Syracuse. According to a recent article in the Syracuse New Times, “by constructing new homes, renovating buildings and attracting businesses like ProLiteracy, the NWSI has made halting but noticeable progress.”

Moreover, Cantor has encouraged the revision of tenure requirements so that faculty members can work on community-oriented projects. She calls it “public scholarship,” and notes by way of example that “at Syracuse, the geography department collaborated with a local coalition on a project to ‘map’ hunger.” On top of this, Cantor hasn’t neglected the cash register—Syracuse has raised more than $1 billion under her leadership.

Does Cantor see herself in the tradition of Conant, Hutchins and Kerr, whom she refers to as “golden-era men”? She thinks highly of them, but sees presidential activism today as inseparable from a “boots on the ground” orientation: “Today you don’t do that from a bully pulpit,” she says. “You do that rolling up your sleeves and being out there.” Her brand of activism, undertaken with many partners, has garnered bruises and setbacks. U.S. News & World Report has downgraded Syracuse University in its college rankings, and Cantor has been accused of neglecting the institution’s academic function. “Our primary mission is not managing cities,” one Syracuse professor tartly informed Robin Wilson of The Chronicle of Higher Education. To which Cantor replied that the university “should have an impact on our democracy and do work that addresses pressing issues in the world.”

Cantor’s willingness to be outspoken and aggressive is refreshing. But where are the other risk-taking presidents? I asked Rawlings to compile a list of those who have demonstrated courage (in contrast to decency and competence) in recent years. He quickly cited the president of the University of Texas at Austin, William Powers Jr., who is in “a pitched battle” against a Republican governor, Rick Perry, whose
higher education policies are “anti-intellectual” and “vocational.” Rawlings added that higher education leaders in Florida have firmly resisted a proposal (from the conservative governor’s task force on higher education) to charge higher tuition rates to liberal arts majors—an effort to bolster what are seen as job-friendly degrees in science, healthcare and technology at the expense of degrees in the humanities.

In an e-mail a few days later, Rawlings augmented his list of courageous presidents: “Lee Bollinger, who led the fight to defend affirmative action at a time when that was not a popular position in that state or nationally…. Scott Cowen, who as president of Tulane when Katrina hit, not only helped bring the university and the community through the crisis, but took the opportunity to transform Tulane’s undergraduate program into the nation’s most service-oriented program among major universities…. Wallace Loh, of the University of Maryland…who has used…his own history to be a leader in support of the Dream Act…. Bob Birgeneau of Berkeley has been an ardent and very public advocate for the Dream Act in California…. Gene Block, who has been outspoken in combating animal rights activists who have used terror tactics against UCLA and its faculty.” His final example: “Myles Brand’s firing of [basketball coach] Bob Knight at Indiana, which was an extremely courageous act and occasioned much opposition, some of it violent and threatening.”

The limited scope of Rawlings’s list ought to inspire soul-searching among higher education leaders. Patrick Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, says, “When you are talking about major institutions in American society, at some point their leaders have to be part of the problem and part of the solution. We might ask them to put themselves at risk a little more than they do.”

In the wake of the Newtown massacre, leadership (and some risk-taking) has come from the presidents of small colleges. Three hundred and sixty presidents have signed a letter—
written by Lawrence Schall, president of Oglethorpe University, and Elizabeth Kiss, president of Agnes Scott College—pushing a legislative agenda for gun regulation. But only about thirty presidents (from places such as Brenau University, Spelman College and Loras College) appeared at a February 4 press conference in Washington to publicize those demands. No Ivy League presidents were present; and no Ivy League presidents, thus far, have signed the Schall/Kiss letter.

* * *

The timidity of presidents is particularly striking in the context of diminishing public funds for higher education. Andrew Delbanco, in his book College, notes that the University of Virginia “now receives a mere 8% of its funding from the state of Virginia, down from nearly 30% a quarter century ago.” One of the few leaders to respond forcefully is Jonathan Cole. In 2009 Cole, a sociologist who served as provost at Columbia from 1989 to 2003 (during which time he defended the academic freedom of Edward Said), published a valuable book, The Great American University, which focuses on the top research universities. How they developed historically, how they achieved great things in the sciences and social sciences, and how they are under threat are the matters that preoccupy Cole.

Chief among the threats are politically motivated interventions from outsiders, which proliferated in the Bush era. Among many examples, Cole cites government pressure on the peer review system at the National Institutes of Health and sweeping assaults on Columbia professors who study the Middle East. (Not mentioned by Cole is that Columbia’s president, Bollinger, was dismayingly silent in the face of those attacks, by pro-Israel activists and journalists, at his own institution [see Sherman, “The Mideast Comes to Columbia University,” April 4, 2005].) The other central issue for Cole is the massive loss of dollars for those institutions that rely on public funds. Near the top of his list is UC Berkeley, which is being “bled by the state.”

Cole’s book evinces a yearning for presidents like Robert Hutchins, who implemented a bold vision for higher education at the University of Chicago and tenaciously defended his institution in difficult times. Cole makes a powerful case that higher education leaders have failed to defend their own institutions with a Hutchins-like intensity. He includes himself in the indictment: “I consider myself as having failed at this, until I wrote this book.”

“Presidents have done a very, very poor job of using the bully pulpit for higher education,” he says. “They have done particularly poorly at educating the American people about the value of the university—its centrality to the future welfare of this country. They have done abysmally on the humanities, failing to educate the public about why the humanities are central to the university, and why they are even central to the sciences in the future.” For Cole, it comes down to guns or butter. Presidents “have failed to explain why the public ought to be supporting the universities as a nondiscretionary item in the budget. You can train three or four students at Berkeley for what it costs to incarcerate a prisoner in California.”

In light of the austerity that has been imposed on so many public colleges and universities, Cole wonders why more presidents don’t resign. “There should be a strong enough view, articulated clearly to governors, legislators and to regents, which says, ‘Here is the value of UCLA, Berkeley, of San Diego, of the community colleges of California. If we disrupt this, we are killing the state. And if you are going to continue to just strangle us, here are the consequences of that for the state of California and the nation, and you will have my resignation.’ And elected officials would probably take the resignation. But the presidents would be taking a stand.”

When Cole scans the corridors of power in higher education, he’s not too pleased with what he sees: “There aren’t many presidents who are fighting against the powers that be.”

* * *

Was there truly a “golden age” of engaged college and university presidents who “sculpted” society? How relevant is that tradition in our time? Cole notes that many past presidents were “Janus-faced.” Nicholas Murray Butler, who led Columbia from 1902 to 1945, won the Nobel Peace Prize, but he also fired professors who opposed US entry into World War I. Conant, according to his biographer James Hershberg, was both progressive and staunchly pro-establishment in his views. Kerr was an educational visionary and a law-and-order administrator who clashed with student protesters he didn’t understand—a set of mistakes he owned up to in his memoir, The Gold and the Blue. “I don’t know that there was a golden age,” says Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University, “but these were people who did at least mount the public stage and try to say something that wouldn’t just be relevant to their campuses.”

Let us also remember that, at their best, those “golden-era men” were very good indeed. Consider the remarkable career of Hutchins. According to his biographer Mary Ann Dzuback, he stood up to his McCarthy-era detractors at public hearings in Illinois, helped educate the public on the peaceful uses of atomic energy, launched the Great Books program and chaired the Commission on the Freedom of the Press (which called for nonprofit media ventures and tighter regulation of media monopolies and drew applause from Walter Lippmann and A.J. Liebling).

Scanning the résumés of two newly appointed Ivy League presidents—Yale’s Peter Salovey and Dartmouth’s Philip Hanlon, who will replace an activist president, Jim Yong Kim—one notices that their entire careers have been spent in academia. The most distinguished presidents of the past had more varied and intriguing backgrounds. As a student at Swarthmore, Kerr volunteered in the ghettos of Philadelphia. During the 1933 cotton pickers’ strike in the San Joaquin Valley—which he called “the biggest and bloodiest rural strike in American history”—Kerr went there to interview sheriffs, strikers and farmers. In 1945, Kerr became the director of the Institute of Industrial Relations at Berkeley and arbitrated the ferocious class warfare that erupted on the California waterfront.

Those endeavors helped to prepare Kerr for the task of building and leading the University of California in the ’50s and ’60s, where he found himself under attack from powerful forces. In 1952, an initiative to add a loyalty oath requirement to the state constitution was put before the voters of California. A group of Bay Area Quakers asked Kerr to join them in resisting it, and he did so in public pronouncements. As he related in his memoir:

I knew the possible consequences and they came quickly, including several from regents. The most dramatic was at the next meeting of the board. The chair of the board (Edward Dickson) came to my office and seized me by the coat lapels. He said I was being viewed as the “Red Chancellor” of the “Red Campus,” and he wanted me to retract what I had done. I refused. I said that I had acted as a citizen in an off-campus context; that I had not given up my rights as an American citizen when I became chancellor; that I never would; and that the regents should know this. Regent Dickson turned his back to me and walked away.

Entreaties for presidential courage have tended to come from outside critics and writers; but occasionally presidents themselves, including Theodore Hesburgh of the University of Notre Dame, have urged their colleagues to rouse themselves. Hesburgh, 95, no longer gives interviews. But his staff referred me to an essay he wrote in 2001 for The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Where Are College Presidents’ Voices on Important Public Issues?” “Today’s college presidents,” Hesburgh wrote, “appear to have taken Voltaire’s advice to cultivate their own gardens—and…they are doing that very well.” Hesburgh’s conclusion remains pertinent: “We cannot urge students to have the courage to speak out unless we are willing to do so ourselves.” (On the theme of presidential courage, note the recent example of Karen Gould of Brooklyn College, who stood up to outside critics demanding the cancellation of a February 7 panel discussion on Israel.)

Leon Botstein of Bard, who has drawn fire for a joint venture the college established with Al-Quds University in East Jerusalem, makes a similar argument. In 1996, in response to a questionnaire from Rita Bornstein, former president of Rollins College, Botstein wrote, “A college president has an obligation to be more outspoken than the average citizen…. Failure to be in a leadership role on matters of public policy…is an act of cowardice and an avoidance of responsibility. We need to teach our students that the civilized assertion of one’s beliefs is an obligation, an honor, and a pleasure.” Does Botstein feel the same way sixteen years later? He replies, “I would only strengthen the sentiment.”

On April 20 of last year, Jon Wiener reported that the president of the
University of California issued a warning: “avoid all protests.”

A man holds up coffee beans above a basket for roasting at Giang Lo Duc coffee shop in Hanoi August 7, 2012. Reuters/Kham

On May 20, the country’s oldest “fair trade” coffee company, Equal Exchange, purchased a full-page color advertisement in the Burlington Free Press. It was an open letter to the CEO of the Vermont-based Green Mountain Coffee company, the world’s largest buyer of fair trade–certified coffee. “We wish to congratulate you for your past deeds,” Equal Exchange wrote, “but now urgently request that you withdraw your support for the certification agency Fair Trade USA…in light of its unilateral decision to change the rules of fair trade.”

Equal Exchange’s advertisement drew public attention to an unfolding schism in the world of fair trade coffee. The current feud, which has been gathering steam for years, erupted in September, when Fair Trade USA—the US affiliate of Fairtrade International, which governs the global fair trade system and sets labeling and production standards from its home base in Bonn, Germany—announced its decision to end its affiliation with the parent body. In fair trade circles, this was a high-level divorce, and it reverberated widely. FTUSA, which is based in Oakland, also declared that it would certify coffee produced on plantations and by independent smallholder farmers—a significant departure from a system that restricts accreditation to coffee grown on democratically run, farmer-owned cooperatives, of which there are 360, mostly in Latin America.

FTUSA’s president and CEO, Paul Rice, is blunt about his reasons for exiting the international system. In a May interview with the blogger Julie Fahnestock, Rice depicted the movement as doctrinaire and hostile to innovation. “If fair trade continues to [exclude] the poorest of poor,” Rice said, “it’s really on moral thin ice.” He went on to say: “Don’t we want to democratize fair trade? Don’t we want fair trade to be more than a white, middle-class movement?” As for innovation, Rice declared, “Everyone is innovating. Look at Apple, everyone…. It baffles me that somehow innovation in our movement is unacceptable.”

Fair trade leaders are pushing back. In a message posted on the Coffeelands blog, which is hosted by Michael Sheridan of Catholic Relief Services, Jonathan Rosenthal, a co-founder of Equal Exchange, wrote: “If you choose to look at who is making this decision to radically change the imperfect tool called fair trade, you might admit that it is nearly totally driven by well intentioned white folks in the US with lots of money and big dreams.” He concluded, “This feels like a move right out of the colonial playbook.”

Fair trade coffee has been a valuable experiment, one that has brought concrete benefits to hundreds of thousands of farmers. But it rests upon a fragile foundation, and the corporate embrace of the concept could undo decades of work by activists, consumers and farmers: democratically run, farmer-owned cooperatives may be unable to compete with corporate-sponsored plantations. “The fair trade model provided some protection from the unequal conditions of the open market,” says Nicki Lisa Cole, a sociologist at Pomona College who has studied fair trade. Welcoming large-scale plantations into the model “re-creates the problematic conditions for small producers that spurred creation of the model in the first place.”

* * *

There is no standard historical account that explains the rise and consolidation of fair trade. In an essay he wrote for a recent collection titled The Fair Trade Revolution, Rosenthal traces the concept back to a handful of idealists, inspired by English Quakerism, who launched “Free Produce Initiatives” in 1790 to sell slavery-free cotton and fruit. The Fair Trade Resource Network, a nonprofit educational organization, credits Edna Ruth Byler, who imported needlecrafts by low-income women in Puerto Rico in 1946, as the principal fair trade pioneer. The first fair trade label, Max Havelaar, was created in 1988 under the auspices of the Dutch development agency Solidaridad. Fair trade–certified coffee (from Mexico) soon appeared on the shelves of Dutch supermarkets. Today, Britain is the world’s largest market for fair trade products; the Netherlands isn’t far behind. Fair trade sales in South Korea and South Africa are growing rapidly. In 2011, global consumers spent $6.6 billion on fair trade–certified products. Coffee represents the largest segment of the market, but one can also purchase fair trade tea, sugar, bananas, cocoa and wine, among many other items.

But what exactly is fair trade? As Equal Exchange wrote in its advertisement: “The objective [is] to remove the exploitation from international trade and build a new system to ensure fairness and market access” for small-scale farmers and workers. A milestone was achieved in 1997 with the founding of Fairtrade International in Bonn, which served to unify global fair trade organizations under a single rubric and a single labeling system. Under this regime, producers in developing nations receive a minimum price—a safety net to cushion farmers and producers against market fluctuations—as well as a premium, a separate payment (for example, 20 cents per pound for coffee) that workers and farmers can invest in environmental, educational or infrastructure projects. The Fair Trade Resource Network estimates that more than 1.4 million people in more than seventy countries directly participate.

In the realm of fair trade, Paul Rice has been a controversial and dynamic presence. “Paul is not afraid to think and act on a big scale. That’s one of his great gifts,” says Jonathan Rosenthal, who has known Rice for decades. “And he’s willing to cut any corners to get there. That, to me, is one of his great faults.” Educated at Yale, Rice moved to Nicaragua in 1983, when the Sandinista revolution was in full bloom. He stayed for eleven years, living for most of that time near the Honduran border. In a recent phone interview, he told me that he worked in the fields, helped to create the country’s first fair trade cooperative (PRODECOOP), trained farmers and managed aid projects. Rice was guarded discussing his experiences in Nicaragua, but his old friends (including Rink Dickinson, co-president of Equal Exchange) insist that he was utterly committed to the revolution and even risked his life for it. Indeed, some of Rice’s friends—including the young American engineer and solidarity activist Ben Linder—were murdered by the US-backed contra rebels. Rice downplays his youthful leftism, saying only, “I’m not going to talk about the Sandinistas. I was committed to social justice, and still am.”

In 1994, Rice left Nicaragua and enrolled in the MBA program at the University of California at Berkeley. Four years later he helped to found Fair Trade USA, which was originally a project of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy in Minnesota. (The IATP strongly opposes Rice’s new initiative to certify plantations and small farmers.) The Ford Foundation, which gave FTUSA $1 million in its early years, also provided it with a long-term, low-interest loan of $2 million. In subsequent years Rice worked indefatigably to build the fair trade brand—not only among consumers, but also among corporate and business leaders. As a result of its partnership with FTUSA, Dunkin’ Donuts uses 100 percent fair trade–certified beans in every espresso drink it sells. Today, Fair Trade USA, which is a 501(c)(3) organization, is robust: it works with 740 companies, including Starbucks, Costco, Sam’s Club, Whole Foods, Ben & Jerry’s and Green Mountain Coffee. In 2010 the organization earned $6.7 million in certification fees, an income that many nonprofits would envy.

* * *

For a long time, Rice has felt constrained by the rules of the global fair trade system. At a conference in Boston in 2003, he was booed for suggesting that plantations should be incorporated into fair trade. He believes the current model is antiquated and inefficient, and that opening the sector to corporations will usher in a rising tide that will lift all boats. “We’re all debating what do we want fair trade to be as it grows up,” Rice told William Neuman of the New York Times in November. “Do we want it to be small and pure or do we want it to be fair trade for all?” “For Paul, it’s all about volume,” says Jonathan Rosenthal. “And that means getting the big guys on board.”

It’s a strategy that raises many questions and warrants close scrutiny. Owing to the limited global market for fair trade coffee (which accounts for about 4 percent of coffee exports to developed nations), the 360 farmer cooperatives sell only a portion of their crops—estimates range from 30 to 35 percent—to fair trade networks; the rest is sold to commercial networks at commercial rates. In my interview with Rice, I asked him why he wasn’t focused on perfecting the current system—which would mean bolstering the farmer co-ops by raising the percentage of coffee they sell to the more equitable fair trade networks—instead of bringing in new supply networks from plantations and small farmers.

Rice’s response was that large coffee companies are determined to mix beans from plantations and fair trade farmer cooperatives in order to label the resulting blend “fair trade.” In order to do so, plantations (Rice prefers the term “estates”) must be brought into the fair trade system through the back door by certifiers like Fair Trade USA—which, since its break from Fairtrade International, is free to do as it wishes. Explains Rice: “The fair trade default response to this was, ‘Can’t you just take the estate coffee out and replace it with co-op coffee?’ Well, that, my friend, is the height of arrogance.” Arrogance toward whom? Toward the professional roastmasters at the major coffee companies: “They’re like alchemists, and they are masters of their universe,” says Rice. “No one tells them how to put together the perfect French roast.” Rice poses a question: Should a roastmaster “listen to some NGO dude who tells him to rejigger his business and re-engineer his blends? No.”

* * *

The response from the fair trade activist community has been fast and furious. Equal Exchange has been at the forefront of the charge, in ways both strategic and pedagogical. The company’s full-page ad in the Burlington Free Press, which urged Green Mountain to stop doing business with FTUSA, was a quixotic attempt to deprive Rice of his biggest customer. Equal Exchange says Green Mountain is FTUSA’s “largest single source of revenue and a critical pillar of support.” (A Green Mountain spokesperson told me that the company will maintain its ties to FTUSA.) Equal Exchange is also circulating a petition in support of “authentic fair trade,” which at press time had garnered more than 8,000 signatures and backing from 550 organizations. (Like many in the fair trade activist community, Equal Exchange is worried that consumers will be misled by a “fair trade” seal that masks corporate involvement; hence its desire to highlight farmer co-ops.) Meanwhile, Rice is circulating his own petition in support of his initiative, which is called “Fair Trade for All”; signers include John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods, and Arturo Rodriguez, president of the United Farm Workers of America.

Much of the anger directed at Rice emanates from his unilateral decision to exit the global fair trade system, which prides itself on its democratic, inclusive structure and its historical roots on the left. Indeed, fair trade producers will soon occupy half the seats on Fairtrade International’s rulemaking general assembly. (Rice’s split with the parent organization has been messy: Fairtrade International claims that FTUSA still owes $1 million in membership fees; Mary Jo Cook, chief impact officer of FTUSA, says the fees were too high and that “our fees for 2011 are still under discussion.”)

Rice’s critics say they were taken by surprise when FTUSA left the parent organization: Merling Preza, who helped to found PRODECOOP along with Rice, told Coffeelands blogger Michael Sheridan, “It hit us like a bucket of cold water.” Says Matt Earley, co-founder of the cooperatively owned wholesaler Just Coffee in Madison, Wisconsin: “The way that FTUSA did it was absolutely undemocratic, and it just flies in the face of what we all consider a broader fair trade movement.”

For Rice’s critics, extending certification to plantations and small farmers is tantamount to a betrayal of core principles. “Cooperatives cannot compete with plantations on the economy of scale,” says Earley. “They can’t compete with them in terms of what they are paying their workforces.”

Rice insists that he cares deeply about the fate of the 360 farmer cooperatives. “I am not going to be the guy who abandoned co-ops,” he told Sheridan. Rice’s effort to expand the fair trade model is currently limited to three pilot projects—two of which, in Colombia and Costa Rica, involve small farmers who are not in cooperatives, while the third, in Minas Gerais, Brazil, involves an estate. Rice is quick to defend that estate, Fazenda Nossa Senhora de Fatima, which has between seventy-five and 110 workers on 568 acres. “It has two amazing owners who are pioneers of organics,” he says. “Those owners have demonstrated a deep commitment to sustainability and to their workers. Fazenda is a natural fit for us.” (Rice is planning other pilot projects as well.)

Moreover, Rice has rolled out a proposal to protect at least some of the co-ops that could suffer under an expanded system that includes corporations and plantations. It’s called Co-op Link, and the goal, he says, is to fortify some of the larger cooperatives—the ones that are likely to sell beans to Green Mountain, Starbucks and Costco. Several of these projects are under way in Latin America, Africa and Asia, and over the past five years, Rice has assembled powerful institutional actors to co-sponsor them: the US Agency for International Development, the Clinton Global Initiative, the Kellogg Foundation, the World Bank and Walmart. But what about the 300-plus farmer co-ops that are not a part of his Co-op Link scheme? Rice doesn’t say, though he admits that many of them are in precarious shape.

Not everyone in the fair trade world is resolutely opposed to expanding certification to plantations and small coffee farmers. Some prominent fair trade actors—who won’t speak on the record—share Rice’s concern for the millions of small farmers whose beans cannot be certified because they are not organized into cooperatives. But those same people are skeptical about Rice’s ties to large corporations, and they recoil from his sharp-elbowed tactics and relentless demeanor. Their skepticism is warranted: in his zeal to push ahead, Rice has sent misleading signals about his timeline, implying that his pilot projects are simply experiments and that they’ll be monitored and assessed by various stakeholders. “I think it will work, I hope it will work,” Rice told the blogger Julie Fahnestock. “But if it doesn’t work, we won’t continue it.”

But Rice is moving fast, and the train has left the station: Whole Foods is already purchasing beans from FTUSA’s Brazil pilot project for one of its espresso blends. (Rice hastens to point out that Whole Foods is paying the fair trade premium, which he says enabled Fazenda’s workers to obtain dental and eye care recently. Indeed, FTUSA insists it will uphold the Bonn standards in terms of a minimum price and premium paid to farmers.) Green Mountain Coffee, which prides itself on its social and environmental responsibility, has adopted a more cautious approach: it, too, will buy beans from the pilot projects but, in the words of its fair trade coffee buyer, Ed Canty, the company won’t label the beans as fair trade–certified “until we have evaluated the impact of these pilots at origin.” That is to say, until the dust from the current brawl has settled.

* * *

Some fair trade experts, such as the Washington State University sociologist Daniel Jaffee, see parallels between the organic agriculture movement of the 1960s and ’70s and what’s taking place in fair trade today. In both cases, standards were lowered or altered to pave the way for corporate involvement. Jaffee notes that what happened to organic agriculture is “a cautionary tale of label dilution and corporate capture,” and it could happen again to fair trade coffee.

Observers predict a protracted struggle ahead. “I don’t see Fair Trade USA caving in,” says Michael Sheridan, whose Coffeelands blog has become a vital forum for discussion on this topic. “It is very committed to its ‘Fair Trade for All’ vision. I don’t think surrender is in Paul’s DNA.” Equal Exchange and its allies are also determined to press on and articulate why they believe a model built on democratic, farmer-owned cooperatives is vastly preferable to one based on privately owned plantations.

The current controversy amounts to a “battle over the soul of the seal,” says Jaffee. Indeed, shoppers will soon be confronted with a plethora of labels. In the past, there was a single certification label for fair trade coffee in the United States, that of FTUSA. Soon there will be at least four labels (and possibly more): Fair Trade USA’s; a label that Fairtrade International has introduced into the US marketplace; a label from the Institute for Marketecology in Switzerland; and a “small producer’s symbol” organized by the Mexico City–based nonprofit FUNDEPPO, which represents the old-line cooperatives in the fair trade system, and which Equal Exchange and other progressive companies have agreed to use.

Further splintering the fair trade coffee scene in the United States is the rising number of progressive companies that have chosen to bypass certification altogether. Some are building their own fair trade brands and posting the relevant information—about the prices they pay and the co-ops they work with—on their websites in an effort at transparency.

Matt Earley and his colleagues at Just Coffee in Madison ended their relationship with FTUSA in 2004: “We saw almost all of this coming nearly ten years ago—the pandering to corporate coffee, them wanting to change their rules to dumb down standards in order to get the big boys more involved.” Earley is fervently devoted to fair trade, but he’s decided to do it on his own terms, outside the certification model. His website lists eighteen coffee cooperatives with whom he has a business relationship. Among them is the Yachil Xolobal Chulchan cooperative in Chiapas, Mexico, which has 1,552 members in seven autonomous municipalities run by the Zapatista revolutionary movement, and which has endured repression at the hands of government security forces and paramilitary groups. Just Coffee pays the cooperative $3.03 a pound for its beans—nearly double the floor price guaranteed under the fair trade system. “We are committed,” Earley says, “to paying farmers a better price than they would receive almost anywhere else.”

In solidarity with the farmer cooperatives, Earley has also decided to embrace the small producer’s symbol—yet another reminder that politically conscious consumers had better scrutinize the fine print on the label. A precarious but worthy experiment is now under threat. Bring your reading glasses to the supermarket.

“You should listen to Shadid,” a one-armed fortuneteller instructed Nasir Mehdawi in 2003. “You should do whatever he says.” The fortuneteller, Hazem, had a mouthful of blackened teeth and a wardrobe singed with holes from the cheap cigarettes he chain-smoked. Turned into a piece of human wreckage while fighting in Saddam Hussein’s war with Iran, Hazem, trained as an engineer, underwent a fierce religious conversion and, from the doorway of a two-room concrete house in the Iraqi capital, became a renowned soothsayer. Among those he regularly counseled was his old friend Mehdawi, who, in lieu of dinars, brought him food—sugar, tea, rice and the occasional chicken.

Mehdawi, who was in his mid-30s, first encountered Anthony Shadid in March 2003. Shadid had arrived in Baghdad to chronicle the imminent US invasion for the Washington Post. Mehdawi was his official government escort, but he wasn’t very assiduous in his duties, routinely allowing his quarry to slip away on brief reporting excursions. Nor was he an admirer of the dictator. When Saddam was deposed, Mehdawi was hired by Shadid as his fixer, and an intense friendship bloomed. For a year the two men worked together seven days a week. In Night Draws Near (2005), his masterpiece, Shadid acknowledged that his weightiest scoops in Iraq, including an interview with the fiery Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, would have been inconceivable without Mehdawi’s contacts, legwork and conscientiousness.

In the wretched months that followed the US invasion, Mehdawi would sometimes threaten to resign, but Hazem advised patience: “Wait for Shadid…. He’s a good friend, and he will serve you.” The chaos of the occupation left Mehdawi with a deep sense of foreboding, and Hazem’s counsel took on a darker cast. In the fall of 2003 the soothsayer warned Mehdawi that his dogged reporting alongside Shadid had brought them both to the precipice, which prompted Mehdawi to inquire if he would be slaughtered in the burgeoning violence. “No,” Hazem replied, “but the situation will be messy. It will be scary…. You should be very, very careful.” Shadid was fascinated by Hazem: “I was always struck by his prognostications, which Nasir would relay to me. They were uncanny, oddly insightful, although it also seemed to me that they could be interpreted in any way that might be appropriate to the situation.”

While driving around Baghdad in a white Chevrolet, with frequent excursions to chaotic and unstable outlying regions, Shadid and Mehdawi consoled themselves with “fatalistic humor.” “I’ll be in prison tomorrow” went Mehdawi’s refrain. They hypothesized about the various ways death might come calling—car bomb, rocket-propelled grenade, machine-gun fire. No, Mehdawi would insist, “these fates were conventional,” Shadid wrote in Night Draws Near. “Daggers—they would be our end. And then we would laugh, even after having made and heard the prognostication many times before.”

“You should listen to Shadid.” For a long time, many of us could do nothing but that, interpreting the labyrinthine politics of the Middle East through his voluminous reporting. Shadid, who died on February 16 at the age of 43, was an exceedingly rare creature in the thinning ranks of American journalism: fluent in Arabic; intellectually and morally serious; utterly enamored, in a historically minded way, of the Middle East and its multifarious people; and a graceful, erudite writer. His idealism was lightly worn but deeply rooted. With his linguistic and reportorial prowess he could easily have been Professor Anthony Shadid, or a house intellectual with a gilded sinecure at an establishment think tank. He chose instead to work in a hazardous corner of the world for wire services and newspapers, under whose auspices he took substantial risks—a bullet believed to have been fired by an Israeli sniper nearly destroyed his spinal cord in Ramallah in 2002—so that a fickle American public might have access to nuanced reporting about ground-level realities in faraway lands. In the end, it wasn’t a car bomb or daggers that felled Shadid when he was on assignment for the New York Times but what appeared to be an asthma attack, triggered by an allergic reaction to a horse, during a clandestine and audacious reporting trip to a Syria shaken by repression and revolt.

* * *

I knew Anthony Shadid a long time ago, in the newsroom of a college newspaper, the Daily Cardinal, in Madison, Wisconsin, when we were both editing it in 1988. He was a Lebanese-American kid from Oklahoma. Gentle and reserved, but emotionally guarded, he had already conceived the ambition to file newspaper dispatches from the Middle East. Late one morning I strolled into the Cardinal office. The lights were off, and a rustle caught my attention. Turning around, I saw Anthony, silhouetted by a dim light bulb, standing at his desk and smoking a cigarette: on the floor was a hefty boom box from which wafted the scratchy sounds of elementary Arabic; he had just taken up the language and was pursuing his studies with steely determination. Back then everyone pronounced “Shadid” the American way, ShAHH-did; later Anthony began to pronounce it in the Middle Eastern manner: “Sha-dEEd.” His study of Arabic was complemented by his march through Middle Eastern and Palestinian history, which fueled his imagination and loosened his tongue. One night he walked over to my desk to tell me, with astonishment and dismay, about the sectarian exploits of George Habash, the founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a fiery Marxist who spearheaded many attacks against Israel, and who was, until his death in 2008, an outsize figure in the ranks of the Palestinian opposition.

I saw Anthony again in New York City in the early 1990s, when he was working as an editor on the international desk at the Associated Press. Mostly we talked about what we were reading. Tina Brown had just devoted an entire issue of The New Yorker to Mark Danner’s epic treatise on the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador, and the piece had left a deep impression on each of us. “It’s the most amazing piece of journalism I’ve ever read,” Anthony confided in a whisper. A few months later he mentioned he was reading Hugh Thomas’s history of the Spanish Civil War and was struck by Thomas’s ability to “write like a novelist.”

In 1995 Shadid said farewell to editing and moved to Cairo as a correspondent for the AP. The five years he spent in that post were crucial to his formation as a journalist and provided the raw material for his first book, Legacy of the Prophet, published by Westview Press early in 2001. Confidently written, but with no trace of swagger or conceit, Legacy of the Prophet is the work of a purposeful reporter determined to master his craft and his subject. The book is built upon Shadid’s exhaustive travel in the region between 1995 and 1999—there is an unexpected but stirring chapter on Sudan—as well as his unusually wide reading of the finest academic literature on the Middle East. (In an admiring blurb, Edward Said called Legacy of the Prophet “a brilliantly reported book on contemporary Islam.”) Shadid wrote about the upsurge of religious faith after the cold war, the increasingly grassroots orientation of Hamas and Hezbollah and the move toward electoral politics taken by the Center Party in Egypt and the Refah Party in Turkey. Terrorism was an erroneous prism through which to view the Middle East, he argued, in a rejoinder to prevailing American attitudes; he insisted that the region must be grasped and analyzed on its own terms. In an updated introduction to the paperback edition of the book, published in 2002, Shadid calmly defended his ideas in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Of the men responsible for the violence, he commented: “the militant Islam under whose banner they operated was in retreat in the Middle East and much of the Muslim world.” A “new politics of Islam,” Shadid insisted, was “beginning to take hold.”

* * *

Nine days before the US invasion of Iraq, Shadid traveled to Baghdad for the Post. One of his editors at the paper, Steve Coll, recently observed that on the job Shadid was frequently drawn to artists, writers, intellectuals and bookstore owners, as well as people who knew the West. Shortly after his arrival in Baghdad, he went to the Hawar Art Gallery, situated on a tranquil street near the Tigris River. On the day he visited, the gallery was filled with painters, sculptors and ceramists, and all of them were in an edgy and pensive mood. Yet they embraced the American in their midst. To one ceramist, Maher Samarai, Shadid conveyed a declaration that George W. Bush had just issued to Iraqis: “The day of your liberation is near.” Samarai wearily replied, “They’re going to burn the forest to kill the fox.” For Samarai, Bush’s comment conjured up bleak memories of British imperial rule in Iraq, specifically the infamous words uttered by Maj. Gen. Sir Stanley Maude, who arrived in Baghdad in 1917: “Our armies do not come…as conquerors or enemies but as liberators.”

As the day wore on, the conversation, fueled by endless cigarettes and cups of sugary tea, turned to the glories of medieval Baghdad, its libraries, zoos, public baths and hospitals, as well as its luminous personalities—“the caliph Haroun al-Rashid, the poet Mutanabi, and the tenth-century philosopher al-Hallaj.” Shadid, who possessed an exquisite grasp of Baghdad’s past and present, added: “In the West, the names of the geniuses behind the city’s golden age mean little, but in Baghdad, in the Arab world, the names of those times remain heroic, even fabled. Their mere mention evokes two centuries of intellectual splendor, drenched in confidence.”

Why did Shadid go to Baghdad in March 2003? In Night Draws Near, he stated that “there was perhaps an element of ambition there; it is sometimes difficult for a journalist to desert a story of such proportions.” There was also a political and humanistic motive: “I didn’t want the Pentagon to write this war like a screenplay.” He stayed in Iraq for fifteen months, and his articles for the Post earned him his first Pulitzer Prize. Night Draws Near conveys only a glimpse of what he personally endured in the harrowing days and weeks following the US invasion, when he lived in Room 622 of the Palestine Hotel, but the few details about his existence offered by the book are striking. On his diet: “tuna, an Egyptian brand of somewhat bland beans known as ful, and a particularly loathsome canned cheese.” On sources of electricity: “small generators, gasoline and car batteries stood on the porch outside our room, to charge computers and satellite phones in the event of a blackout.” On his sleeping arrangements: “On the first night of the bombing, we wore our clunky blue flak jackets and black helmets to bed.” It was typical of him to discount his own bravery, while honoring the stoicism and courage of ordinary Iraqis. The day after the invasion’s first barrage he spoke to a middle-aged acquaintance, who remarked, “Last night was a little rough, but life goes on…. To tell you the truth, I was neither shocked nor awed.”

A remarkable feature of Night Draws Near is Shadid’s ability to navigate the various layers of Iraqi society, from the spacious homes of doctors to the garbage-strewn hallways of slum tenements. His fluency in Arabic was essential; but he also needed lessons in etiquette, over which Mehdawi the fixer presided.

I learned that throwing water behind departing loved ones wards off evil and hastens their return. I was told to hold the tiny cup of bitter Arabic coffee in my right hand and to shake it, ever so slightly, if I didn’t want it refilled from the swanlike spout of the kettle. I understood that the person on the right enters a door first when two or more people approach. I was reminded never to yawn without covering my mouth. I was taught respect.

After the invasion, there was little time to sip coffee. Baghdad was burning, and Shadid had work to do. On April 7, 2003, a B-1 bomber dropped four 2,000-pound bombs on the Mansur section of the capital; the goal was to kill Saddam Hussein. When Shadid got to Mansur, he found a scene of “awesome devastation.” Surveying the crater and the rubble, he detected an eerie silence, followed by a shout from local residents: “They found something!” What he saw was not a story line in the Pentagon’s screenplay: “The mauled torso of twenty-year-old Lava Jamal was pulled out…. Moments later, a few feet away, others found what was left of her severed head, her brown hair tangled and matted with dried blood. Her skin had been seared off.” That image would haunt him. So would the image of a child he glimpsed a few weeks later in the emergency room of a Baghdad hospital: she had “a flop of thick black hair and eyes like glimmering black pools. In three places, shrapnel had torn her soft brown skin like paper.” Shadid fled to his hotel room, where he stood “for a moment, on our sixth-floor balcony that overlooked the placid waters of the Tigris, to take a break from the reality.”

The Americans had effortlessly taken Baghdad, but they had no idea how to administer it, and many Iraqis were livid. Shadid’s damning portrait of the first year of the occupation—perhaps the best account we will have from a Westerner—would later become conventional wisdom in the United States; but let us remember that his work preceded that near-consensus, and helped to prepare the ground for it. In Night Draws Near Shadid tells the history of that first year through Iraqi eyes, and many things seen are refracted through their consciousness—the looting, which Shadid compared to a “knife dragged across the city, digging wounds that would never heal”; the utter lack of security; the burning of the National Library and the looting of the National Museum of Antiquities. The book shows, with vividness and subtlety, how the initial months of the occupation opened the way to a resurgent Shiism, a vicious insurgency and a sinister flood of bombings that have continued to this day. Halfway through his narrative, Shadid steps back from his ground-level reporting and observes:

Another scenario for life after Saddam was perhaps possible: the ruler falls, to the joy of many; a curfew is imposed in the capital, and a provisional government is quickly constituted; basic services—electricity, water, and sewerage—are rapidly restored; security, at times draconian, is imposed in the streets; and aid starts pouring into Baghdad…. The occupation might have unfolded that way—but it didn’t.

Shadid was not privy to events in Washington, and doesn’t concern himself with the Pentagon’s planning process before the invasion; he wrote about what he saw in Iraq, and what he knew in his gut. A central motif of Night Draws Near is that the United States—its government and its people—never bothered to understand Iraq and the Iraqis, a sentiment most clearly expressed in the prologue, when Shadid declares, with tightly coiled and uncharacteristic fury: “Our televisable notions never captured the haunting, ambivalent, and bitter complexity of even one conversation, during war or in its shadow,” with an Iraqi citizen.

* * *

“Anthony was not a thrill seeker,” his indomitable Times colleague Tyler Hicks has written, “but he understood that the truth had to be found at the source.” In the summer of 2003, the US military unleashed a counterinsurgency campaign in the Sunni Triangle, and Shadid and Mehdawi traveled to the beleaguered village of Thuluyah, where they found residents seething about the tactics employed by the American occupiers: a 15-year-old had been shot in the arm, which made him drop a baby he was holding; a mentally retarded teenager had been beaten with rifle butts; and more than 400 residents had been arrested. Villagers focused their rage on a local informer named Sabah, who had supposedly identified insurgents to US troops. As Sabah was escorted about by the Americans with a burlap bag over his head, his mangled right thumb and yellow sandals made him instantly recognizable to the villagers.

Shadid soon returned to Thuluyah to probe the fate of Sabah, whose destiny was grim. Relatives of two men killed by American troops had issued a chilling injunction to his family: they must kill their son or be killed themselves. Shadid wrote, rather laconically, “The logic was cold but, in the context of resurgent tribal justice, flawlessly sound.” This is the moral terrain of Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, and in its description of these events Shadid’s prose has a shimmering precision. Sabah’s family tried to resist the ultimatum, but their efforts were futile. Shadid recorded what happened next.

Sabah’s brother and uncle brought him back to Thuluyah in July. He never left again. On the day after his arrival, two hours before the dawn call to prayer, the village still shrouded in silence, his executioners entered his room. The decision was already made. Sabah’s father and brother each carried an AK-47. And with barely a word spoken, they led him behind the house, nestled in orchards of fig and almond trees, vineyards and groves of oranges and tangerines. His hands trembling, the father raised his rifle and aimed it at his eldest son. “Sabah didn’t try to escape,” Abdullah said. “He knew he was facing his fate.”

Toward the end of the book, Shadid visits the weather-beaten British cemetery in Baghdad, and stands before the weedy tomb of Maj. Gen. Stanley Maude. In the hands of a hack, such a visit, heavy with symbolism, would be a creaky literary device. But Shadid, who rarely offered his political opinions, had earned the right to yoke British and American imperialism. A year after the invasion, he returns to Baghdad’s Firdos Square, where the massive statue of Saddam had been famously toppled. There, surrounded by Humvees blasting songs by Blondie, Guns N’ Roses and Johnny Cash, he encounters an older man who tells him, “They got rid of Saddam for us. None of us could have done it. But they should have provided us with something better. Instead, we got something worse.”

As the book concludes, relentless violence has splintered Shadid’s inner circle. Nasir Mehdawi’s house is bombed, and when Shadid arrives to join the cleanup, he is jolted by graffiti in the neighborhood: “We will cut off the heads of the Americans.” In a panic, Mehdawi seeks the advice of Hazem, who declares: “I told you not to remodel your house…. You must leave.” Mehdawi and his family soon flee to Jordan. Pondering the meaning of his friend’s exile, Shadid reaches, as he often does in the book, for an Iraqi proverb: “Everything short of death is acceptable.”

* * *

In 2006, while covering Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, Shadid learned that his ancestral home in the small village of Marjayoun—the home in which his great-grandparents had resided and from which much family lore originated—had been damaged by an Israeli rocket. He decided to take a year off, moving to Marjayoun to undertake the restoration of the house.

It was a necessary sabbatical. When he moves to Marjayoun he is physically spent; his mood is bleak, his soul parched. He cannot vanquish from his mind an image from the Lebanese town of Qana: “Where Israeli bombs caught their victims in the midst of a morning’s work, we saw the dead standing, sitting, looking around.” His personal life has reached its nadir. The years spent chasing stories—he refers ruefully to his “career building”—have wrecked his marriage to an American doctor, and he feels a corrosive sense of guilt about living thousands of miles away from his 6-year-old daughter, Laila: “To her, I was an untethered voice on a cell phone.”

House of Stone is Shadid’s account of his year in Marjayoun, a place he describes as “fading”: “It can no longer promise the attraction of market Fridays, when all turned out in their finery—women in dresses from Damascus, gentlemen with gleaming pocket watches brought from America.” The book is also a family memoir, with a great many pages devoted to the lives of his ancestors and their journey from Marjayoun to Oklahoma. By any measure, it’s a lesser book than Night Draws Near, which, like Legacy of the Prophet, is a full-bodied and finely textured narrative, ambitiously conceived and painstakingly realized. By contrast, House of Stone is baggy, tentative and, in some places, forced, shortcomings that could be signs of a struggle to write in the first person after decades of traditional newspaper reporting.

The book’s most affecting pages chronicle a path to renewal as the house slowly takes shape and Shadid, with no deadlines to meet, gradually finds comfort in the gossipy, claustrophobic village of his ancestors.

Each day, I probably walked around the plants four or five times, watching roses coming out, plums and peaches appearing on trees I had planted only weeks before, flowers blooming from a clump of wild tulips I transplanted, and buds emerging on grapevines that once seemed lifeless. The petunias had taken root. So had the honeysuckle…. I learned to respect the garden, where rituals and right actions prevailed. Patience was requisite. There was redemption in silence. Seasons were restorative.

Choosing the right antique tile for the house becomes an obsession, and a chance for Shadid to lose himself in books about the history of tile; his account of being gouged by wily tile merchants exposes his guileless side. In the end he buys more than 2,000 tiles, and devotes himself to the arrangement and scrubbing of each one: “I brushed the tiles, washed them with casual swipes that always revealed something interesting—unexpected colors or swirls that at first seemed random, but when put together revealed some intricate design.” As the house begins to attain its former grandeur, despite many delays in the restoration, Shadid finds repose: “I had spent most of every evening outside, eating fresh almonds, sipping scotch, and feeling a peace that I had not felt in a long time. The house was utterly tranquil but for the sound of the wind blowing through the trees. The fragrance of jasmine enveloped me.” By the end of the book, Shadid has fully acquainted himself with the ghosts of his ancestors and created a physical space—a house of stone and tile and flowers, for himself and his descendants—of deep spiritual resonance: “Nothing could wreck it; no war could destroy it. I could always go there. It was always with me.” It pierces the heart to know that his two children—he had a son with his second wife, Nada Bakri—will not see him in it.

* * *

Following his year in Marjayoun, Shadid once again became entangled in deadlines, but he never forgot about Sabah, the alleged informer. In 2009 he returned to Thuluyah, and heard things that made him wonder if Sabah had been the victim of a plot hatched by village elders. In 2003, a few weeks after Sabah had been killed, Shadid initiated one of his most arduous interviews: a conversation with Sabah’s father. The scene is described in Night Draws Near, and it is the soul of the book. The three men—Mehdawi is there too—are sipping tea in a cinderblock house in Thuluyah; the host clutches his prayer beads. Shadid, in his mind, replays the question he needed to ask: had this man really killed his own son? In the end, the reporter chooses to remain silent: “Even as a journalist, in a job that celebrates provocation and whose standards require confirmation, I couldn’t muster the courage to broach the question. In a moment so tragic, so wretched, there still had to be decency.”

Decency, and courage—may these qualities always be associated with Anthony Shadid.

The New York Public Library’s proposed Central Library Plan (CLP)—under which $350 million would be spent on a colossal renovation of the 42nd Street facility—is becoming increasingly controversial (for the full backstory, see my article “Upheaval at the New York Public Library” from the December 19, 2011 issue). Writing in Inside Higher Ed on March 28, Scott McLemee, in an essay headlined “Stop Cultural Vandalism,” noted: “The Central Library Plan is a case of long-term planning at its most shortsighted. It will affect scholars and writers in both the United States and abroad, and will have a particular impact on some fields of study in which the library has especially important collections, such as Russian literature.” Like many observers, McLemee is enraged by the NYPL’s proposal to remove 3 million books from seven levels of century-old stacks beneath the magisterial Rose Reading Room, and he demanded to know why “a collection of three million volumes gathered over more than a century is being treated as a distraction, rather than as the institution’s entire claim to cultural significance.” 

Opposition to the CLP has been spearheaded by Joan Wallach Scott, a historian at the Institute for Advanced Study. In a protest letter to NYPL President Anthony Marx, Scott noted the downsizing of the NYPL’s Slavic and Baltic Division; the deterioration of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, in Harlem; and the weakening of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (at Lincoln Center Plaza), which has seen a significant reduction in specialty librarians who, for decades, catered to students and scholars of dance, music, recorded sound and theater. Scott also took aim at NYPL’s argument that “democratization” of the 42nd street library is a necessary goal under the CLP. “That seems to be a misunderstanding of what that word means,” Scott wrote. “The NYPL is already among the most democratic institutions of its kind.” As of April 18, Scott’s letter, which is still circulating, has garnered nearly two hundred signatures, including those of Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, Salman Rushdie, Jonathan Lethem and Jonathan Galassi, president of Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Concern about the NYPL’s future has also come from the distinguished Princeton historian (and library expert) Anthony Grafton, who wrote in the Daily Princetonian on April 2: “My stomach hurts when I think about NYPL, the first great library I ever worked in, turned into a vast internet cafe where people can read the same Google Books, body parts and all, that they could access at home or Starbucks.” (In addition to Grafton, several other professors and writers have recently been asked by the NYPL to serve on an advisory panel; they include David Nasaw, Andre Aciman and Annette Gordon-Reed.)

In response to the criticism, the NYPL has initiated a media outreach campaign: in recent days Marx has been interviewed by Leonard Lopate and Brian Lehrer of WNYC radio, as well as Robin Pogrebin and Sam Roberts of the New York Times; he has published essays in the Huffington Post and Inside Higher Ed; and he is currently taking online questions from readers of the Times. Many of those readers—along with citizens who have written to Marx privately—have lamented the NYPL’s culture of secrecy and are demanding transparency with regard to the CLP. One reader, Nadav Samin, wrote: “In light of the mixed public reactions to the CLP, is NYPL’s leadership planning to hold a town hall meeting to discuss this plan with New York City residents and other interested parties?… A town hall meeting would be useful for articulating NYPL’s vision for the future of its flagship branches, and would allow concerned citizens to have a voice in the reshaping of this prized public institution.”

In July 2010, Hilde Hoogenboom, a professor of Russian literature at Arizona State University, sent an impassioned missive to Paul LeClerc, president of the New York Public Library, to protest the closure of the NYPL’s Slavic and Baltic division. It “was one of the best places to work in the world,” she wrote. Indeed, in the universe of Russian studies, the Slavic division was legendary. “I recall [it] as an agreeably dim sort of place, with a faintly reverential, almost cathedral-like ambience,” George Kennan said in 1987. Among its 750,000 items are the first book printed in Moscow, the “Anonymous” Gospels; a first edition of Tolstoy’s War and Peace; and John Reed’s collection of broadsides and posters from the Russian Revolution. Trotsky and Nabokov toiled in the division’s reading room. Václav Havel and Mikhail Gorbachev made visits of tribute.

Eleven weeks later, a senior NYPL official replied on LeClerc’s behalf: “If I may put this matter into its sadly grim financial context, in the last two fiscal years our budget has been reduced by $20 million and our workforce by 300 positions. While we recognized and prized the special cultural and scholarly resource that was the Slavic Reading Room, we simply could no longer afford to operate it.”

The New York Public Library, which comprises four research libraries and eighty-seven branch libraries, has seen other cutbacks as well. Since 2008 its workforce has been reduced by 27 percent. In a recent newsletter to library supporters, the institution reported that its acquisitions budget for books, CDs and DVDs had been slashed by 26 percent.

Despite these austerity measures, NYPL executives are pushing ahead with a gargantuan renovation of the Forty-second Street library, the crown jewel of the system. The details of the Central Library Plan (CLP) are closely guarded, but it has already sparked criticism among staff members, who worry that the makeover would not only weaken one of the world’s great libraries but mar the architectural integrity of the landmark building on Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, renamed the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building in 2008, following the Wall Street billionaire’s gift of $100 million. (Every staff member I spoke with demanded anonymity; a number of them talked openly about their fear of retribution from management.)

These are arduous times for public library systems. More people are using libraries during the economic downturn, but state and local legislators are steadily cutting their budgets. The American Library Association notes that since 2008, “more than half the states have reported a decrease in funding, with cumulative cuts averaging greater than ten percent.” Library systems of all sizes are under pressure. The Los Angeles County public library system, which serves 3.7 million citizens, faces a structural deficit of $22 million a year for the next decade. Budget cuts have forced the Seattle Public Library, one of the nation’s finest, to shut down for a week in late summer. Thomas Galante, CEO of the bustling Queens Library, which serves hundreds of thousands of immigrants in New York City, spoke reverently about one healthy and outstanding public library—in Toronto.

The man who must contend with the NYPL’s budget difficulties is its new president, a tall, amiable, casually dressed political scientist named Anthony Marx, who started at the library on July 1. Marx had been the president of Amherst College, where during his eight-year tenure he raised great sums of money and did much to diversify the student body. But obtaining the financial resources to sustain the NYPL in these lean and mean times is a task that’s sure to keep Marx tossing in his bed at night. (Personal reasons may also keep Marx from sleeping soundly: on the afternoon of November 6 he was arrested in Upper Manhattan for driving while intoxicated; his blood alcohol level was 0.19. He is scheduled to appear in court on December 9.) He faces an additional challenge with the CLP, devised by his predecessor and scheduled to be completed in 2015.

The centerpiece of the CLP—expected to cost anywhere from $250 million to $350 million—is the construction of a state-of-the-art, computer-oriented library designed by British architect Norman Foster, in the vast interior of the Schwarzman Building. To make space for this library within the library, the seven levels of original stacks beneath the third-floor Rose Reading Room—stacks that hold 3 million books and tens of thousands of adjustable and fixed shelves—will be demolished (the exterior of the building is landmarked; the stacks are not). When the new library is completed, patrons will be able to leave the building with borrowed books and other materials; for decades, those materials had to be used inside the library.

NYPL officials have grand hopes for their new high-tech circulating facility: it will be “the largest comprehensive library open to the public in human history,” LeClerc wrote in an internal NYPL publication in 2008. How will it be paid for? The City of New York will provide about $150 million for the project. The NYPL expects to raise another $100–$200 million by selling off two prominent libraries in its system: the busy (but decrepit) Mid-Manhattan branch library on Fortieth Street, and the Science, Industry and Business Library on Thirty-fourth Street, a research library that opened in 1996 to considerable fanfare.

* * *

Today, top NYPL officials talk about the CLP—announced in late 2008 but delayed by the economic downturn—as a done deal. But Marx says the NYPL’s powerful board of trustees has not yet given its final stamp of approval; he adds that he is still analyzing the plan. Yet the CLP has gathered an enormous amount of momentum. On June 29 I was sitting in the cavernous office of Ann Thornton, a top NYPL librarian, when LeClerc, just days from retirement, burst in, in a state of high excitement. “Here’s the news,” he declared. “We got the $100 million from the city. Isn’t it just fantastic?” (Noting my puzzled look, LeClerc turned to me and said, “It’s for Norman Foster’s renovation of this building.”) Thornton jumped to her feet and embraced him. “Paul, that’s wonderful!”

The CLP raises thorny questions. Will Forty-second Street remain a serene environment for scholars, serious readers, intellectuals and book lovers, or will it be converted into a noisy, tumultuous branch library? Might the $250–$350 million designated for the renovation of Forty-second Street be better spent on the eighty-seven branch libraries, many of which need structural improvements as well as books, periodicals, DVDs and computers? Finally, there is the question of the public good. NYPL executives say the objective of the CLP, which involves the sale of two prime Manhattan properties, is to democratize the Forty-second Street library, incorporate the latest digital technology and serve the public. They emphasize their desire to expand public access to Forty-second Street: Thornton told me that in a building of 600,000 square feet, only 32 percent of that space is available for public use. After the renovation, she says, users will have access to almost 70 percent of the building.

NYPL executives may be keen to serve the public, but they are not so keen to engage it. Many aspects of the CLP remain cloaked in secrecy, and top NYPL staff imparted details of the plan only with great reluctance. The NYPL’s mission statement, which executives are quick to invoke, highlights the word “accountability.” My reporting, which included sixty interviews, left me with a different impression: the NYPL preaches accountability, but it doesn’t always practice it.

When the Beaux-Arts building at Forty-second Street, designed by famed architects Carrère and Hastings, opened on May 23, 1911, more than 30,000 people came to see a library that had taken twelve years to construct. “The first book to be delivered,” Phyllis Dain wrote in her 1972 history of the NYPL, “seven minutes after deposit of the call slip, was a Russian-language study of Nietzsche and Tolstoy.” Over the decades, the NYPL would acquire a spectacular range of materials: Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence, Walt Whitman’s personal copy of Leaves of Grass, Virginia Woolf’s cane, Man Ray’s portrait of Arnold Schoenberg, Oscar Wilde’s early typewritten versions of The Importance of Being Earnest, Beethoven’s sketches for the “Archduke Trio,” a first edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. The list goes on.

The NYPL was a vital institution in twentieth-century New York: a refuge and a magnet for immigrants, writers, intellectuals, students, the unemployed and lost souls. Dain writes that in 1917 the young David Ben-Gurion used the NYPL to research his first book. In a New York Times essay about his early years as an Irish immigrant in the city in the early 1950s, Frank McCourt, author of Angela’s Ashes, recalled, “It was Tim Costello who told me to get out of his bar and walk a few blocks to where I’d see two lions, and to go in there and get myself a library card…. Up on the third floor, I discovered Paradise: the great reference room with its hundreds of index-card drawers. I asked a librarian if it would be all right to look in the drawers and he said, ‘Of course, of course, anything you like.’”

For the NYPL, the 1960s and ’70s were a period of decay and decrepitude. The most evocative account of that period is Philip Hamburger’s 1986 New Yorker profile of Vartan Gregorian, who took over the NYPL presidency in 1981. His colleagues reminisced about the rot that greeted Gregorian: “that beautiful, aging building, just being taken for granted, and going downhill fast”; “the back yard is Bryant Park—drunks, drugs.” Gregorian revitalized the library with prodigious fundraising from individuals, foundations and corporations 
($10 million from the Vincent Astor Foundation; $1 million from Exxon, etc.), and a series of lavish dinners and events—all necessary: Hamburger’s sources stressed that while the Library of Congress received more than $200 million annually from the government, the NYPL had to scramble for funds—a situation very much the case today.

Gregorian was succeeded by LeClerc, a French literature scholar. Many staff considered LeClerc frosty and aloof, but he accomplished much in his sixteen years at the NYPL: a
$50 million renovation of the main branch’s facade; a $15 million renovation of the magisterial Rose Reading Room; a series of first-rate exhibitions; the creation of eight branch libraries; the launching of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers; the acquisition of major manuscript collections; and some fine web initiatives, including the much-praised digital gallery.

Like Gregorian, LeClerc was a skilled fundraiser. In 2008 he persuaded Schwarzman, one of his trustees, the chairman, CEO and co-founder of the Blackstone private equity group, to donate $100 million to the NYPL. In recognition of the gift, Schwarzman’s name was carved into the facade at Forty-second Street in five prominent places. (Schwarzman told the Times it was the NYPL’s notion—not his—to rename the main branch for him. He added that it was a “pretty good” idea.) However, the local community board opposed the five carvings, on the grounds that they were “excessive and unnecessarily intrusive to this iconic facade.” (LeClerc, whose salary and benefits package in 2009 was $866,865, declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Other controversies trailed LeClerc. Writing in The New Yorker in 1998, Mark Singer reported that the NYPL had allowed 500 cartons of printed pamphlets, some of which were produced in the seventeenth century, to be sold to rare book dealers. In 2005 the NYPL sold a renowned painting from its collection, Asher Durand’s Kindred Spirits, for $35 million in a closed auction at Sotheby’s. (The buyer was Walmart heir Alice Walton.) That closed auction inspired a scorching essay by Times art critic Michael Kimmelman, who described the process as “hasty and secretive.” In 2007 the NYPL agreed to sell a beloved branch library—the Donnell, across from the Museum of Modern Art—to Orient-Express Hotels for $59 million. A refurbished Donnell was supposed to be incorporated into a new hotel on the site in 2011. But the economic downturn prompted Orient-Express to extricate itself from the deal, and the building has been vacant for more than three years. The Orient-Express contract was recently transferred to two developers, who finally paid the NYPL. But local residents will have to wait until late 2014 for the Donnell library to reopen.

* * *

On a sweltering July afternoon, I called on the NYPL’s new president in his elegant wood-paneled office on the second floor of the Schwarzman Building. Marx was born in 1959 to parents who took flight from Hitler’s Germany. He was raised in the Inwood section of Upper Manhattan, where he haunted the local branch of the NYPL. He attended Wesleyan and became active in the student movement against apartheid, which had captured his imagination. After graduation he went to South Africa. He was keen to see—in his words—the place he had been “yelling and screaming about”; he also wanted “adventure.” There, in what he now sees as the “pivotal moment” of his life, Marx helped create a preparatory institution, Khanya College, which he describes as a “one-year residential college for a select group of African students who had been undereducated by apartheid.” Those were heady days for Marx: his residence in 1984 was a “commune of blacks and whites living illegally together, where we would get raided, and amazing people would come through hiding from the police.”

After graduate study at Princeton, Marx was hired by Columbia as a professor of political science in 1990. In addition to his academic duties, he organized a program to help Columbia undergraduates get fast-tracked to teaching jobs in New York City public schools. But writing academic monographs wearied him. Says his friend Robert Townsend, an English professor at Amherst, “He told me he’d reached the end of a scholarship track, and that he wanted to switch to something else. That’s good self-knowledge.” In 2002 Marx’s name was given to a search committee at Amherst hunting for a new president. They chose Marx; he was 43. In his eight years at Amherst, the college raised nearly $500 million. Marx secured two remarkable gifts—one for $100 million and the other for $25 million.

His fundraising efforts were matched by a passionate campaign, resisted by some faculty members, to bring non-elite and foreign students into the ranks of one of America’s most selective private colleges: as a result, students of color constitute almost 43 percent of Amherst’s freshman class. Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who writes frequently on education, credits Marx with helping to “change the conversation in higher education about diversity, expanding it beyond race to include socioeconomic status. He used his position of leadership and his charisma to bring attention to the idea that having rich kids of all colors wasn’t enough. Second, he showed that excellence and economic diversity were two sides of the same coin, not competing values. Over a five-year period, he oversaw a 24 percent increase in students eligible for Pell grants even as other institutions were seeing declines.”

Marx’s friends say his interests and passions—egalitarianism, the democratization of knowledge, public access to information—make the NYPL an ideal fit for him. (They also say he was eager to return to New York. His wife, Karen Barkey, teaches at Columbia.) But Marx faces a steep institutional learning curve: the NYPL is a much more complex and labyrinthine institution than Amherst College. Amherst has 835 employees; the NYPL has over 2,200 employees in more than ninety locations, many of them unionized. At Amherst, Marx faced opposition from perhaps 15–20 percent of the faculty, who questioned his admissions policies and wondered if Amherst could adequately support students from non-elite backgrounds. (Some professors also felt that Marx’s rhetoric was too sanctimonious.) In New York City, by contrast, he could find himself at odds with a wide constellation of political opponents and critics. At Amherst, Marx worked harmoniously with a twenty-person board of trustees; the NYPL’s board comprises sixty-two people—some of whom contribute hefty sums to the institution. Observers say the NYPL is a trustee-driven institution and that staff members approach trustee meetings with palpable anxiety and dread.

At least two matters from LeClerc’s tenure continue to reverberate in the Marx era. In September 2008 the NYPL dissolved two specialist divisions at Forty-second Street: the Slavic and Baltic division and the Asian and Middle Eastern division. Three of the divisions’ old-fashioned reading rooms were also shut down. The closing of the Slavic and Asian and Middle Eastern divisions surprised their devoted users, many of them scholars. The scholars I talked with lamented the covert way the decision was made. Some NYPL staff are sympathetic. Says one, “It was a stealth closure, a fait accompli. It was done in a way to prevent protests.” The reading rooms are closed to the public, but a few hints of the past remain. On a bookshelf in front of the old Slavic Reading Room are several dozen bulky maroon volumes that constitute the NYPL’s dictionary catalog of the Slavonic collection; mounted on a nearby wall are two charts of the Cyrillic transliteration system.

Questions remain about access to those collections. Since 2008 users of the Slavic collection have lamented the absence of a distinguished full-time curator, as well as full-time staff, to guarantee the safety and accessibility of Slavic materials. Not long ago, a scholar was invited into the closed stacks at Schwarzman to retrieve a book. (“We can’t read Cyrillic,” a librarian explained.) As Hoogenboom wrote in her letter to LeClerc: “Despite cutbacks in library staff at other foremost Slavic collections in the U.S., every Slavic collection of any standing in this country has a curator and several librarians.” Marx told me in July that he was “disturbed” to learn about accessibility problems with the Slavic collection. A bit of progress has since been made: on Novem-
ber 17 the NYPL confirmed the appointment of Stephen Corrsin as curator of Slavic, Baltic and Eastern European collections. But Corrsin is not full-time; he is also the curator of the Dorot Jewish Division. There is no full-time Slavic expert to serve the public and interact with scholars. (NYPL officials insist they are still committed to building and supporting their Slavic holdings.)

The anger and dismay about the closing of the two divisions have emanated mainly from the Slavic scholars. Few users, it seems, have complained about the closing of the Asian and Middle Eastern division (some veteran NYPL staff still refer to that division by its original name, the Oriental division). But the former curator of that division, John Lundquist, made a noisy departure. Marilyn Johnson’s recent work, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All, contains an interview with Lundquist, whom she describes as “a refined presence, as if he’d been polished at Oxford, or just come from tea with T.S. Eliot.” Lundquist, who has since left the NYPL, is blunt:

Our division has been dissolved. Our reading rooms have been closed. Our librarians have been reassigned…. In theory we continue as collections, the Asian and the Baltic, but I’m highly skeptical…. The whole library has been drastically downsized…. There has been nothing about this in the press, no. Obviously the library doesn’t want any publicity…. They foresee many thousands more people in this building, and that, to them, is a worthy goal. There is a perception that libraries are archaic, dead, outdated, and that everything is now on the Internet, in digital form. We are old, stooped-over people, doing old, stooped-over things. [The NYPL administration] want[s] to lighten things up, they want the library to be active and hip.

Lundquist concludes: “I gave a talk about my new book across the street at the Mid-Manhattan branch. That place is utter chaos. And it will all come here—the noise, the teenage problems, the circulating DVDs.” Lundquist was alluding to the Central Library Plan.

NYPL officials insist that the CLP is primarily about consolidation and cost-cutting. “We need to get more efficient,” a high-ranking official told me. “Our sources of revenue from the city and state are not keeping up with inflation. We’ve got to find ways to structurally reduce our costs. And one way to do that is to have less overall square footage systemwide, because every square foot of space costs money to clean it, to maintain it and to staff it.” (The City of New York provides most of the funding for the branch libraries; the four research libraries, including Forty-second Street, are sustained to a great extent by private philanthropy and an endowment of $813 million.)

Marx frames the CLP as a matter of public access. He argues that too much of the Schwarzman Building is off-limits and that exquisite rooms are used as storage spaces. Says Marx, “The driver of the idea of a central library plan is that in the back quarter of this iconic building are stacks of books that are rarely used. We can store and get access to those books without having to take the prime space in a prime location in New York City. To the degree that we can make that space available, and replace books with people, that’s the future of where libraries are going.”

One of the NYPL’s more energetic trustees, Carl Pforzheimer III (whose family endowed a majestic room in the main branch, the Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle), puts it a little differently: “The stacks are important to have, but it’s more important to use the space properly for the future.” Robert Darnton, director of the Harvard University Library and a longtime NYPL trustee, takes the same view—that Forty-second Street should be reconfigured to make room for computers and public spaces where users can talk with one another. Darnton contests the notion that removing 3 million books from Forty-second Street constitutes a retreat from the NYPL’s research mission. “Books can be rearranged in lots of ways,” he says. “What you need to do is to assure accessibility” to the books “and to increase the growth of your collections.”

How accessible will the books be? NYPL officials say they will put them in two colossal storage facilities: one behind the library below Bryant Park, the other in Princeton, New Jersey. (NYPL officials say the latter facility is far superior to the Forty-second Street stacks in terms of climate control; they also affirm that materials can be faxed and e-mailed to patrons at Forty-second Street.) And what about those users who need books immediately from the Princeton facility? NYPL officials uniformly insist that the materials can be transported to Forty-second Street in twenty-four hours; but staff members dispute that, saying that book delivery can take up to five days. (I recently waited two weeks for materials that never arrived; “off-site” requests have become onerous in recent years. Also, a great many books seem to be missing from the library.) Staff members are concerned that books being transported from Princeton to Forty-second Street might be damaged en route.

Storage and book delivery are paramount issues for library staff, some of whom maintain that the Schwarzman Building has become less attractive to scholars, researchers and serious readers. One can and does strike gold at the NYPL; still, a downward trend is evident. One employee says, “I know many people who do not come to Forty-second Street anymore because they cannot get the books they need to work there.” Top NYPL administrators bristle at those words, but the statistics show that a large gap has opened up between NYPL and other top research libraries. In 2008, according to data from the Association of Research Libraries, the four research libraries of the NYPL spent
$15.2 million on “library materials expenditures.” In 2010 the NYPL spent $10.8 million. By contrast, in that year Harvard spent $32.3 million; Columbia, $26.4 million; and Princeton, $23.1 million. (A pilot program involving NYPL, New York University and Columbia allows “vetted” NYPL users with a “sustained research need” to check out certain books from the libraries of NYU and Columbia. This program—by which books can leave the Schwarzman Building for the first time in decades—seems to be a tacit acknowledgment by the NYPL that it can’t keep up with those institutions.)

One staff member told me about the recent experience of a researcher who came to the Schwarzman Building for scholarly reference books. The books, it turned out, were in the Princeton storage facility. “She didn’t want to go to the trouble to call the whole set from off-site, and to renew it every week, and this and that,” the staffer explained. Columbia’s library had those books on the shelf, so she went there. “I think her experience counts for exactly zero with the current library administration,” the staff member told me. “That’s not the kind of reader they want—this woman probably doesn’t even know how to tweet.”

The pungency of that remark suggests several things: the low staff morale at the NYPL’s research libraries (morale has fallen further since the news of Marx’s DWI arrest landed in the papers); the deep-seated suspicion many staff members feel toward NYPL executives, some of whom have MBAs but not library science degrees; a feeling among some that the NYPL administration is excessively enamored of social media and Google Books (a plan to digitize tens of millions of books, now in legal limbo) to the detriment of old and new materials printed on paper; and widespread staff skepticism about the CLP. Nearly every employee I talked with expressed affection for the old stacks at Forty-second Street and horror at the idea that those thousands of shelves might be gutted. “The whole building is a single architectural masterpiece,” says one. “The CLP would basically destroy half the library.”

Staff members have many questions about the CLP: if a principal goal is to tear down the stacks and replace books with computers, why not refurbish Mid-Manhattan, or the much newer Science, Industry and Business Library, as a modern computer center, thereby preserving Forty-second Street for its original purpose—the housing of books and printed materials?

Devotees of New York City architecture are also growing alarmed. Charles Warren, a Manhattan architect who co-wrote a 2006 book about Carrère and Hastings, says, “The building is a machine for reading books in. The stacks are part of what the building is. There’s an idea there: that the books are in the center and they rise up out of that machine into the reading room to serve the people. It’s a whole conception that will be turned on its head by ripping out the stacks. It’s a terrible thing to do.” New York–based scholars also express concern about demolishing the stacks. David Levering-Lewis, an NYU historian twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize, says, “We would need to review that very carefully, and perhaps resist it.”

Staff members were aroused by a September 18 Times article that mentioned Norman Foster, the architect hired to renovate Forty-second Street. The article, by Philip Nobel, disclosed that one of Foster’s prominent buildings in Las Vegas, the Harmon, will soon be torn down; according to the article, “construction flaws were found years ago.”

* * *

In mid-August I accompanied Marx on a tour of four NYPL branch libraries in Upper Manhattan. (An NYPL manager did the driving.) Our second stop was a branch on 160th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, in a densely populated section of Washington Heights. Things looked grim from the outside: the facade’s elegant nameplate had been defaced with spray paint, and the NYPL flag was in tatters. But the branch was full of users. At the end of the tour, the director asked Marx, “Would you like to see the custodian’s apartment?”

Marx hesitated. The expression on his face suggested that showing the apartment to a reporter might not be the best idea, but his finer instincts prevailed. As we mounted the stairs to the top of the building, the director explained that when the branch libraries were constructed, with funds from Andrew Carnegie in the early 1900s, the top floor was given to a custodian, who lived there with his family. The apartment we were about to see had been vacant for half a century.

The director opened the door, and suddenly we were in Jacob Riis’s New York. The space was pitch black, except for a bit of sunlight coming through dingy windows. I saw rubble, cobwebs, peeling paint and an ancient tenement bathtub; there were six bedrooms and a spacious kitchen. Why was this space never renovated and incorporated into the bustling library downstairs? The director replied that there was never enough money. Later that day we visited the George Bruce branch library on 125th Street in Harlem. That building, too, had an empty custodian’s apartment. I asked the director what she would do with it if funds were available to renovate. “I’d use it for a teen center,” she said. When asked about her branch’s needs, she quickly answered, “Ten more computers.”

A few weeks earlier, sitting in Marx’s office, I had asked whether a significant portion of the $250–$350 million designated for the Central Library Plan should go instead to the eighty-seven branch libraries. I could see the annoyance in his eyes as he replied, “I won’t sacrifice what those branches can do for the opulence of Forty-second Street.” But Marx didn’t say how he would get the money to fully renovate the branches, which need a lot of help: for instance, the famed Jefferson Market Library in the heart of Greenwich Village has been encased by scaffolding for ten years; that branch has no public restrooms. A staff member there told me that a shortage of money explains the glacial pace of the renovation. Reconfiguring the CLP in a way that would benefit the branches may require delicate negotiations between Marx and the board of trustees, which appears to be strongly committed to the CLP.

Although stabilizing and improving the finances of the NYPL is Marx’s principal order of business, incorporating the voices of the community into the decision-making process will be another challenge for him. One word that comes up frequently is “secrecy.” Staff members use it to describe the routine behavior of the NYPL administration; activists who resisted the closing of the Donnell employed it; the scholar/activists galvanized by the Slavic and Baltic division’s shutdown used it; and Michael Kimmelman mentioned it in his Times essay about the NYPL’s sale of the Durand painting. Kimmelman’s words still resonate: “It’s time for transparency. Increasingly we demand it from government, the media and Wall Street, in response to dwindling public faith. The same should apply to libraries and museums, which also regularly test our trust.”

The NYPL’s responsiveness to the public was put to the test in Harlem. In the spring of last year Howard Dodson, longtime director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture—one of the NYPL’s four research libraries and a revered institution in Harlem—announced his retirement. Some local residents, according to the Times, speculated that the Schomburg’s enormous collection would be transferred to Forty-second Street; others postulated that the Schomburg would abandon Harlem for New Jersey. In response to those rumors, and the passions they ignited, the NYPL convened a “community conversation” in the Schomburg’s auditorium on 135th Street, which lasted for two hours. Onstage were LeClerc, Dodson, actress Ruby Dee and Malcolm X’s daughter Ilyasah Shabazz. LeClerc assured the crowd that the Schomburg was secure in Harlem. But people who know the building well say it needs extensive renovations and new computers.

It was wise of LeClerc to convene a meeting in Harlem. Rumors were dissipated; facts were presented; opinions were exchanged. The theory of accountability was put into practice. Marx would do well to convene another “community conversation,” at which the public can articulate its feelings not only about the contours of the Central Library Plan but about the shape of the entire New York Public Library in the years to come.

In a valediction written in 2007, Ian Jack, the outgoing editor of Granta, suggested that the ballyhoo that greeted the magazine’s occasional “Best Young Novelists” issues had effectively upstaged its nonfiction. “The media loves judgments and lists,” Jack grumbled. Not long after, in an interview with the Observer, he discussed the challenges of commissioning long-form nonfiction: “The style should be like a book, and reasonably timeless, but it’s hard to find people who can do that at 10,000 words.”

Jack, who had edited Granta since 1995, and his predecessor, Bill Buford, who had revived the magazine in 1979, met the challenge with verve. Old issues are thick with nonfiction gems—not just celebrated treatises like James Fenton’s eyewitness account of the fall of Saigon but lesser-known pieces of memoir, travel writing and reportage noteworthy for the care taken with words. There’s Stanley Booth on the Rolling Stones; Martha Gellhorn on the US invasion of Panama; Ian Parker on London’s traffic; Diana Athill on her editorial relationship with the cantankerous “Vidia” Naipaul; and Amit Chaudhuri on a Gujarati tailor who, after surviving an anti-Muslim pogrom, was granted asylum in communist-run Calcutta. The list goes on.

Granta’s fate looked uncertain in 2005, when its owner, Rea Hederman, sold it to the philanthropist Sigrid Rausing. Turbulence ensued: the estimable Jack exited with a cryptic remark—“I wish I could say exactly why I am leaving”—and was followed by two editors who left in quick succession. Then, in 2009, John Freeman, who had been Granta’s American editor, ascended to the top job. Freeman had recently published a lackluster manifesto about literary magazines in the Independent, and as an editor he was unseasoned, so one thought it best to hold the applause.

Two years on, there is nothing lackluster about the Granta edited by Freeman and his deputy, Ellah Allfrey; one of our essential literary quarterlies is in robust health. Fiction has always been an essential ingredient of Granta, and in that realm the editors have for the most part exhibited sound judgment. Recent issues have featured stories by luminaries (Kenzaburo Oe and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) as well as relative newcomers (Leila Aboulela and Julie Otsuka), and all these selections are appealingly fresh and entirely worthy of a publication that bills itself as “The Magazine of New Writing.” But some baffling choices have crept in: for example, Nadeem Aslam’s story “Leila in the Wilderness,” the lead piece in Issue 112, is a lemon.

In its edginess and originality, Granta’s nonfiction continues to inspire. Three recent pieces are indicative of the magazine’s determination to cover the world in a way that transcends an Anglo-American perspective. In Issue 107, Rana Dasgupta offers a bleak and riveting portrait of New Delhi in an era of exploding capitalism and “frenzied accumulation.” Dasgupta shows Delhi through the eyes of three people: a cigar-chomping psychotherapist who views the place as “a city of traumas”; a young, filthy-rich businessman who boasts that he has leased, for seventy-five years, 700,000 acres of land in Ethiopia for his commercial use; and a disenchanted left-wing muckraker who observes that “no one is interested in what’s really going on. We don’t even have a vocabulary to talk about it.”

In Granta 109, Daniel Alarcón investigates the subterranean universe of literary piracy in Lima, a city where new books are quickly smothered by unauthorized editions, sometimes even before their publication. The culprits are pirates who stash “overworked, antique presses” in “nondescript houses in slums all over the city,” and hard-bitten vendors who sell their wares in sprawling outdoor markets and on smog-choked street corners. Written in a gritty style reminiscent of early Vargas Llosa, and streaked with love and vexation for a city Alarcón knows intimately, the essay has a rich narrative conceit: Alarcón decides to hunt for his own books in the bazaars. The results are droll and unsurprising.

Perhaps no recent piece of Granta nonfiction is more affecting than Mark Gevisser’s “Edenvale,” from Issue 114, the story of two elderly black men, “Phil” and “Edgar,” and the clandestine gay life they led in Johannesburg for more than half a century. Gevisser explores the dark crevices of apartheid and emerges with a tender and unsentimental account of gay urban history. A friend of Phil and Edgar’s, an older white man named Roger, describes the interracial parties he hosted in his bungalow on the northern edge of the city, where he endeavored to create a “welcoming atmosphere, a place where our black friends could meet us and each other safely and feel secure in the white part of town, particularly if it was after curfew.” Roger enforced certain “rules”: “The bath was always full…so that you could wash off someone else’s bodily fluids if there was a raid.” A remark of Phil’s rang in my ears long after I had read Gevisser’s final sentence: “To be black and gay, uh, uh, uh! It was double trouble.”

For many years Granta has produced themed issues—“India,” “News,” “London” and “Shrinks,” to name a few. Freeman and Allfrey have sustained the tradition with a clutch of well-executed issues: “Chicago,” “Work,” “Pakistan” and, just published, “The F Word,” on feminism. Despite its hazy theme, the issue “Going Back” is lively. There is a poem by Adrienne Rich; letters from Iris Murdoch to Raymond Queneau; Richard Russo’s memoir of his decaying hometown, Gloversville, New York (which in its heyday produced 90 percent of the dress gloves made in the United States); and, not to be missed, a jeremiad on digital culture by Hal Crowther, whose barbs might have impressed Twain and Mencken, and whose painstaking attention to writing befits the magazine that published it.

In 1978, when Geoff Dyer was 20, he read William Hazlitt’s essay “My First Acquaintance With Poets” and was entranced by an autobiographical passage: “So I have loitered my life away, reading books, looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing, thinking, writing on what pleased me best.” On the spot Dyer decided to become a professional scribbler. He kept that promise to himself, and since 1986 he has published novels, travelogues and essay collections, but also wide-ranging volumes on jazz, photography, World War I and John Berger.

Dyer, who was born in England, adopted Hazlitt’s tendency to loiter, as well as his conception of literary freedom. (Hazlitt’s blazingly acerbic language did not leave an impression.) Indeed, it’s freedom that defines Dyer’s professional identity—freedom to write what he pleases, freedom to trespass on literary genres, freedom to ridicule academia, freedom to travel the world. Open a Dyer book and you will see him wandering through Paris with a joint in one hand and a desirable woman in the other; enjoying himself on the beaches of Mexico and Thailand; reading a book on the waterfront of New Orleans; strolling through the Pushkin Museum in search of works by Gauguin; or taking the bus to Franco’s “Valley of the Fallen” near Madrid. To read his work is to step into a parallel universe of art, literature, jazz, friendship and sex, all of which are set against a backdrop of bohemia, squalor and existential distress. It’s a formula that has won Dyer a cult following and plaudits from peers: his recent novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (2009) carried blurbs from the likes of Zadie Smith, William Boyd and Jan Morris.

Dyer knows that he has managed a rare feat on Grub Street: in an age of academic specialization and journalistic decay, he has earned a living by the poise and productivity of his pen. “As I grew older I came increasingly to feel that my working life should be virtually synonymous with living my life as I wanted, irrespective of whether I was doing any work,” he declared in the introduction to his 1999 essay collection Anglo-English Attitudes. “Effectively, as my American publisher put it, I had found a way of being paid for leading my life. I liked that a lot, naturally.” But freedom entails risks; one wonders if Dyer—whose literary persona is an uneasy synthesis of idler and intellectual—has ranged too widely and written too much. Of his dozen books, only one is first-rate; a handful of the rest are worthy of the bookshelf. Dyer is extremely gifted, but he is also a writer in search of his ideal subject. It is not Geoff Dyer, contrary to what Dyer might think.

* * *

Dyer’s first book, a study of John Berger called Ways of Telling, was published by Pluto Press in 1986. (It has never appeared in the United States.) In this dense and airless book—“dull” is how its author has since described it—Dyer moves chronologically through each phase of Berger’s life and career, summarizing and assessing his works, placing them in their historical and intellectual contexts and launching counterstrikes against Berger’s detractors. Ways of Telling is a tribute to Berger—“the hope of this book,” Dyer writes in the preface, is “that he may be seen not as an exception but as a model”—but Berger never comes to life on the page, as he does so effectively in Adam Hochschild’s Mother Jones profile from 1981. Visiting Berger at his eighteenth-century farmhouse in the French Alps, Hochschild observed, “It has cold running water only; across the driveway is a two-hole outhouse with snow drifting through cracks in the walls.”

Ways of Telling is full of insightful passages, and Dyer’s account of the British art scene in the 1950s is admirably comprehensive. But the book has the whiff of the library and the left-wing bookshop: it’s the work of a young Oxford-trained writer calling attention to his intellectual grooming. A typical sentence reads: T.J. Clark’s “books on Courbet are definitive in a way that none of Berger’s could be.” Other passages are incoherent: “Literary taste is nurtured, in general, in the English faculties of institutes of higher education. The aesthetic consensus that results is, ultimately, given the social function of these institutions, ideologically informed.”

Still, Dyer backed into a fruitful subject. John Berger has always been a compelling and neglected figure, and anyone with a serious interest in Berger will eventually have to consult Ways of Telling. The book, it seems, served a salutary function in Dyer’s career. From Berger—who has devoted his life to Marxist-oriented art and cultural criticism, as well as fiction, reportage, personal essays and screenplays—Dyer gained a very expansive sense of form, an unwillingness to dwell in a single genre. (From his immersion in Berger’s shelf of books, Dyer may also have learned the virtues of laughter, the absence of which mars Berger’s work.) Dyer’s ties to Berger have remained strong: in 2001 he edited Berger’s Selected Essays, to which he contributed a stirring introduction.

In 1989 Dyer published his first novel—The Colour of Memory, a chronicle of bohemian life in Brixton in the ’80s. The themes are familiar and the writing is mostly mundane (“I caught a cold and passed it on to someone else. I went out; I stayed in.”) But one facet of the novel, beneath the principal narrative line, catches the eye and the ear. Dyer appreciates jazz, and writes about it with flair: “The clean, intelligent emotion of Jan Garbarek’s tenor filled the room. Audible landscapes formed and re-formed themselves around us. Morning music, mist melting in the sun.” Dyer ended up taking stock of his talent as a music writer and finding a form for it: in 1991 Jonathan Cape published what is still his most vibrant work—But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz. (An American edition appeared from North Point Press in 1996.) It consists of seven atmospheric vignettes concerning major figures in jazz, including Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, Lester Young, Ben Webster and Art Pepper; other giants, including Coleman Hawkins, make fleeting appearances. Sewn into the narrative is a silver thread about Duke Ellington traveling the country by car: “Duke had said many times that the road was his home and if that was true then this car was his hearth.” The book artfully combines fiction and nonfiction: some of the events described took place—for instance, the assault on Chet Baker in 1966—but the material has been transmuted by Dyer’s imaginative interpretation of old black-and-white photographs, court transcripts, archive footage and clippings from the New York Herald Tribune. “As a rule,” he writes in the preface, “assume that what’s here has been invented or altered rather than quoted. Throughout, my purpose was to present the musicians not as they were but as they appear to me.” The various threads form a seamless whole.

A substantial imaginative leap separates Ways of Telling from But Beautiful. The quasi-academic language of the Berger book is gone; Dyer’s prose in But Beautiful is akin to a musical instrument: it has the swirl, beauty, flexibility and range of a tenor saxophone as blown by one of the masters. (Keith Jarrett, in a blurb for But Beautiful, compared the book to a “great solo.”) The section on Lester Young unfolds in a dingy Broadway hotel, where the ailing Young is subsisting on Chinese food and booze:

When they jammed together Hawk tried everything he knew to cut him but he never managed it. In Kansas in ‘34 they played right through the morning, Hawk stripped down to his singlet, trying to blow him down with that big hurricane tenor, and Lester slumped in a chair with that faraway look in his eyes, his tone still light as a breeze after eight hours’ playing. The pair of them wore out pianists until there was no one left and Hawk walked off the stand, threw his horn in the back of his car, and gunned it all the way to St. Louis for that night’s gig.

This is how Dyer begins his section on Mingus:

America was a gale blowing constantly in his face. By America he meant White America and by White America he meant anything about America he didn’t like. The wind hit him harder than it did small men; they thought America was a breeze but he heard it rage, even when branches were still and the American flag hung down the side of buildings like a star-spangled scarf—even then he could hear it rage. His response was to rant back, to rush at it with all the intensity that he felt it rushing at him, two juggernauts hurtling toward each other on a road the size of a continent.

Here is Monk strolling in Manhattan, gazing over the Hudson:

As he looked out across the river a smear of yellow-brown light welled up over the skyline like paint squeezed from a tube. For a few minutes the sky was a blaze of dirty yellow until the light faded and oil-spill clouds sagged again over New Jersey. He thought about heading back to the apartment but stayed on in the sad twilight and watched dark boats crawl over the water, the grief of gulls breaking over them.

But Beautiful is not flawless. Because Dyer has a better command of diction than of narrative, some of the chapters feel shapeless and made me yearn for A.B. Spellman’s Four Lives in the Bebop Business (1966), an insider’s nonfiction account, which, among many other virtues, has a brisk narrative pace. Dyer is acutely aware of the ways American racism marked the lives of his subjects, but sometimes his treatment of race is too abrupt and heavy-handed. On other occasions, Dyer pushes his deft ventriloquism too far, as in this passage describing Mingus in his wheelchair: “Even talking was becoming difficult. His tongue lay in his mouth like an old man’s dick.”

These are minor imperfections. But Beautiful is powerfully concise: “Booze, junk, prison. It wasn’t that jazz musicians died young, they just got older quicker.” There are intriguing musical insights: Mingus “wasn’t like Miles, who heard the music and then simply transferred it from his head to the instruments. Mingus didn’t hear music until he was making it.” But above all there is the kind of emotional power and lyricism often associated with the writing of the late Whitney Balliett, whose jazz criticism graced The New Yorker for four decades. The apex of But Beautiful is a snapshot of Art Pepper in his prison cell at San Quentin, unfurling a blues on his alto saxophone while his mind expands with visions of the debauchery for which he was renowned. Pepper’s solo has an entrancing effect on his cellmate, Egg, who is snugly ensconced on the top bunk. It’s a vignette of great resonance and beauty.

Authors routinely reinvent themselves. When Norman Mailer published his swaggering collection Advertisements for Myself in 1959, few would have expected him, twenty years later, to win a Pulitzer Prize for a thousand-page “true life novel” about Gary Gilmore. Mailer’s audacious gamble paid off artistically. If you’ve read Dyer’s books in chronological order—including his lean, modest essay on World War I, The Missing of the Somme (1994)—it’s hard not to be baffled by the identity he assumed in Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence (1997). The denizen of libraries and left-wing bookshops had reinvented himself as a slacker: “I do everything badly, sloppily, to get it over with so that I can get on to the next thing that I will do badly and sloppily so that I can then do nothing.” But slackers are not generally inclined to write learned treatises on John Berger or ransack jazz archives, as Dyer did in the research for But Beautiful, a book that features epigraphs from Theodor Adorno and Ernst Bloch.

Out of Sheer Rage has a simple conceit. For years, Dyer tells us, he aspired to write a “sober academic study” of Lawrence; lassitude prevented him from doing so. What he wrote is a book about trying to write a book about Lawrence—a shaggy tract on boredom, inertia, despair, missed opportunities, stressful obligations and dead ends, among other afflictions. In Dyer’s hands, the rules of biography are inverted: on a visit to Sicily, where Lawrence lived in the early 1920s, Dyer encountered an old woman who knew Lawrence, but he neglected to ask her any questions (“she was old and tired and I was too respectful”); instead of energetically following Lawrence’s footsteps through Mexico, he lounged on the nude beach of Zipolite in Oaxaca.

Out of Sheer Rage—which his publisher identified as a “memoir”—emerged from Dyer’s dissatisfaction with the standard conventions of travel writing and literary biography. (He scoffs at “state-of-the-fart theorists” who churn out papers with titles like “Alternatives to Logocentrism in D.H. Lawrence.”) Dyer was hardly alone in his displeasure with those genres: Janet Malcolm harbored her own set of concerns about the biographical treatment of Sylvia Plath, and in 1994 she produced a startling work of criticism and literary journalism, The Silent Woman, about the moral and ethical pitfalls of the biographical enterprise, and about the “sadism and reductionism” of journalism. Certainly there are some valuable passages in Rage—including some fine pages on Lawrence’s conception of freedom and a moving evocation of his final months, in addition to a few funny gags—but one can’t escape the sense that Out of Sheer Rage, which helped to cement Dyer’s reputation on these shores, is vastly overrated. It has a sprawling narrative architecture that cannot be hidden beneath (or justified by) a slacker pose. Its prose is verbose, a defect aggravated by its frequently rancid tone (“I hate children and I hate parents of children”).

What explains Out of Sheer Rage’s cult popularity? Surely there are finer books on procrastination and the hazards of the literary enterprise. (See Martin Amis’s The Information or Jonathan Raban’s For Love and Money.) When Out of Sheer Rage was published, memoirs were in vogue: a first-person account of “wrestling with D.H. Lawrence” may have appealed to highbrow sensibilities bored by run-of-the-mill accounts (real or invented) of incest, divorce, substance abuse and alcoholism. The author holds little back: the book contains too much Dyer and not enough Lawrence. We learn about Dyer’s athlete’s foot, his bad knee, his aching back and his eczema; his deep desire to live in San Francisco and his disgust for the residents of Oxford; and his in-flight sexual fantasies (“Often in planes I find myself thinking of having sex with the flight attendant: pushing my hand up between her legs as she walks past, fucking in the toilet: standard in-flight porno stuff”). In such passages the slacker becomes a buffoon. There’s no better example than the scene in which Dyer and his girlfriend throw down their towels on the beach in Zipolite: “I moved around in front of Laura who was dozing, one knee raised up, legs slightly apart so that I could see her cunt. After a few moments I became lost in the pleasure of looking at her breasts, her legs, her stomach, her cunt. My prick stirred into life…. I spat in my hand and rubbed saliva over the head of my prick.”

* * *

“If we’re being utterly frank,” Dyer wrote in 1999, “there were times when it was only the prospect of one day being able to publish my journalism that kept me writing ‘proper’ books: do a few more novels, I reasoned, and maybe my obscurity will be sufficiently lessened to permit publication of the book I really care about, a collection of my bits and pieces.” That’s a just admission: Dyer’s novels, including The Colour of Memory, do feel halfhearted in their texture and structure. The Search (1993) is a weird detective story seemingly written under the influence of Chandler, Coetzee and Calvino. Dyer’s most enjoyable novel, in which melancholy and humor achieve a fine balance, is Paris Trance: A Romance (1998), which brings to life two young expatriate couples adrift in France; pack it for the long flight to Charles de Gaulle. Dyer’s most recent novel is the overpraised Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, the first half of which is a lethargic account of the Venice Biennale, related by a hack; in the second half, an expat writer hanging out in Varanasi undertakes a journey from anxiety to a kind of transcendence; in the final pages he is wearing a dhoti and bathing in the Ganges. As one expects from Dyer, there are some ingenious and witty passages. But his India is a thick stack of clichés (“there was shit everywhere…. Every kind of shit”). For a realistic and affecting account of Varanasi, read Pankaj Mishra’s novel The Romantics (2000).

If Dyer’s four novels are collectively unsatisfying, the same is mostly true of his travel writing. In 2003 he published Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It, a collection of forgettable dispatches from Cambodia, Paris, New Orleans, Detroit and Miami, some of which originally appeared in The Threepenny Review, Modern Painters and Feed. Colin Thubron or Neal Ascherson he is not: “Taxi drivers urged us to go to the killing fields,” he writes in the Cambodia chapter, “but we were too hot and tired—the heat meant we were tired all the time—and had no desire to see piles of skulls, and so, whenever possible, we retired to the breezy familiarity of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club.” Platitudes fall like dead leaves: “If you are happy, being alone in a hotel, on expenses, drinking beer, and watching porno is close to bliss; but if you are lonely and unloved it is utterly soul-destroying.”

Like But Beautiful, Yoga elides the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction; but the results are much less satisfying. In the preface Dyer notes, “Everything in this book really happened, but some of the things that happened only happened in my head.” To position his travel book between genres is obviously Dyer’s prerogative. But readers pay a price: we are denied the authorial responsibility of nonfiction and possibly the unbridled imagination of fiction. Yoga has a half-finished feel: it seems to be one of his “proper” books, a bridge to what he really cares about—his miscellaneous journalism, his “bits and pieces.”

The appearance of such a collection, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, indicates that the author is doing what he most enjoys. Happily for the reader, the idler has been supplanted, this time around, by the critic and close reader. The book contains sections on art, writing and music, as well as some personal essays. Many of the pieces first appeared in London newspapers, and they are too brief to be effective in book form. One exception is Dyer’s review of Denis Johnson’s Vietnam novel, Tree of Smoke (2007), where his skills as a book reviewer and critic take flight:

Johnson is all over the place, and he is an artist of strange diligence. It is as if his skewed relationship to the sentence—not really knowing what one is and yet knowing exactly what to do with it—operates, here, at the level of structure. Tree of Smoke is as excessive and messy as Moby Dick. Anything further removed from the tucked-up, hospital corners school of British fiction is hard to imagine. It’s a big, dirty, unmade bed of a book, and once you settle in you’re in no hurry to get out.

The strongest pieces—on F. Scott Fitzgerald, Rebecca West, the Goncourt brothers and recent books and movies about Iraq and Afghanistan—are the ones where Dyer has the space to stretch his legs, burnish his prose and spin a web of connections. In his essay on the photographer William Gedney he writes:

Gedney was fascinated by the history of his [Brooklyn] street and spent long hours in the local library, excavating its past, transcribing quotations, and pasting newspaper accounts of significant events of the street’s history into what he designated his “Myrtle Avenue Notebooks.” Whitman—whose grave Gedney photographed—had also lived on the avenue for a while, and the paper he had edited for several years, the Eagle, boasted that this first paved and graded street in the area was “the pride of the old-time Brooklynite.” That was in 1882; by 1939 Henry Miller considered it “a street not of sorrow, for sorrow would be human and recognizable, but of sheer emptiness.”

Dyer has a gift for excavating magnificent quotes from other writers, but it’s a gift that frequently serves to overshadow his own paragraphs. Consider how hard it would be to improve upon these lines, which he discovered in Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. West had encountered a student interested in writing a thesis about her:

I explained that I was a writer wholly unsuitable for her purpose: that the bulk of my writing was scattered through American and English periodicals; that I had never used my writing to make a continuous disclosure of my own personality to others, but to discover for my own edification what I knew about various subjects which I found to be important to me; and that in consequence I had written a novel about London to find out why I loved it.

Certain readers may be charmed by Dyer’s essay on his quest for the perfect doughnut and the ideal cup of coffee:

Finding Grand Central Station was easy enough, but finding Oren’s Daily Roast within the vast station complex was extremely difficult. Eventually I found it, saw it, saw a line of people queuing up, saw that although it was essentially just a stall, they did indeed stock Doughnut Plant doughnuts but that only one vanilla doughnut remained. I joined the queue. If anyone had taken the last doughnut I would have pleaded with her and put my case—‘If you knew what I have been through this morning…’”

Near the end of the collection is an essay titled “Reader’s Block,” wherein Dyer confesses, “I find it increasingly difficult to read. This year I read fewer books than last year; last year I read fewer than the year before; the year before I read fewer than the year before that.” Admirers of his literary criticism may mourn that disclosure; but I hope it inspires Dyer to immerse himself again in the world of music and musicians, preferably jazz musicians. In his hands, a book about Charles Mingus and “White America” would be fascinating. So would a biography of Don Cherry—whom Dyer calls his “guiding spirit,” and whose photograph is pinned above his writing desk, or a history of West Coast jazz, from Art Pepper to Charlie Haden. The research could be undertaken in San Francisco, where the doughnuts aren’t half bad.

When The Paris Review appeared in 1953, its format was familiar to aficionados of literary periodicals: the first issue featured poems, short fiction and a pair of essays on trends in French and Italian literature. But there was one surprise: a thirteen-page Q&A with E.M. Forster, headed by an image of a manuscript page of thirty-three dense lines of spidery script, beginning with the words "Gentlemen. Gentlemen," culled from an unfinished novel. The interview itself, conducted in Forster’s high-ceilinged rooms at King’s College, Cambridge, was refreshingly blunt. "interviewers: [We] have also never felt comfortable about Leonard Bast’s seduction of Helen in Howards End…it came off allegorically but not realistically. Forster: I think you may be right." Subsequent Q&As with Dorothy Parker, William Faulkner, James Thurber, Nelson Algren and Truman Capote helped to establish The Paris Review as a vibrant new literary periodical, and Ernest Hemingway remarked, "I have all the copies of The Paris Review and like the interviews very much. They will make a good book when collected."

The first collection of those interviews, titled Writers at Work, was published by Viking Press in 1958. A second volume, featuring Q&As with Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and Mary McCarthy, appeared in 1963. More than a dozen other volumes would follow, and the editors eventually expanded the series to include discussions with playwrights, biographers, nonfiction luminaries, editors and the occasional literary critic; but novelists would always remain at the heart of the enterprise. Nearly all of the interviews were overseen by George Plimpton, who, until his death in 2003, edited the transcripts (and the published collections, most of which are now out of print) with devotion and dramatic flair.

In the decades that followed the journal’s debut, perhaps only the Q&As in Playboy equaled its own in quality and reputation. But the two publications adhered to very different editorial practices and procedures. The Playboy interviews were often combative and controversial, and Playboy‘s editors were not generally inclined to defer to the needs and whims of the subject during the editing process. (Playboy, moreover, did not limit its Q&As to literary figures: the magazine published interviews, up to 25,000 words in length, with Malcolm X, Jimmy Hoffa, Bertrand Russell, Fidel Castro, Albert Speer and John Lennon.)

The Paris Review settled on a more conciliatory approach. As Philip Gourevitch explains in his introduction to a new edition of Paris Review interviews, a four-volume compilation of greatest hits, "A Paris Review
interview is always a collaboration, not a confrontation…. The purpose is not to catch writers off guard, but to elicit from them the fullest possible reckoning of what interests them most." To guarantee that outcome, editors have always granted the subject final approval of the transcript. Gourevitch, a distinguished reporter who recently completed a five-year stint as PR‘s editor, admits that its protocols are "unapologetically at odds with journalistic practice."

The logistics of a PR interview varied widely. Herbert Gold mailed questions to Vladimir Nabokov at the Montreux-Palace Hotel in Switzerland. When Gold arrived at the hotel, he found an envelope waiting for him: "the questions had been shaken up and transformed into an interview." Saul Bellow polished the transcript in hamburger joints and on park benches near the University of Chicago. Don DeLillo answered questions at an Anselm Kiefer exhibition in Manhattan and in "a comically posh bar." Cynthia Ozick sat at her dining room table with a typewriter and spontaneously typed out answers to questions posed by an interviewer seated a few feet away. Jorge Luis Borges met PR in a "large, ornate, high-ceilinged chamber" at the National Library in Buenos Aires, surrounded by Piranesi’s etchings. Pablo Neruda was interviewed on a stone bench facing the sea at his home in Isla Negra, Chile.

In the introduction to her 1984 interview with Philip Roth, Hermione Lee outlined a process that she says she found "extremely interesting": in the summer of 1983 she spoke with Roth for a day and a half in his room at the Royal Automobile Club in Pall Mall, after which he revised the transcripts she sent him. Roth and Lee continued their dialogue in early 1984, and again Roth went to work on the transcript—processing "raw chunks of talk" into "stylish, energetic, concentrated prose." Intricate sentences were spawned: "Any satirist writing a futuristic novel who had imagined a President Reagan during the Eisenhower years would have been accused of perpetrating a piece of crude, contemptible, adolescent, anti-American wickedness, when in fact he would have succeeded as prophetic sentry just where Orwell failed." Lee referred dryly to her published interview with Roth as "Philip Roth’s presentation of himself."

The problem is that when people present themselves, a great deal of material is left out, and the moral, intellectual and biographical contours of the interview are substantially altered. Reading the finished transcript of a Paris Review interview, it’s not difficult to detect what has been omitted: Norman Mailer, in two interviews forty years apart, was not asked why he stabbed his second wife, Adele, in their Manhattan apartment in November 1960; Louis-Ferdinand Céline was not asked about his fascist and anti-Semitic pronouncements in the 1930s and ’40s; Doris Lessing was not asked about her life-altering experiences in the Communist Party; Gabriel García Márquez was not asked about his cozy relationship with Fidel Castro (for a splendidly combative interview with the Colombian master, excavate Claudia Dreifus’s 1982 Q&A in Playboy); V.S. Naipaul was not asked about the chilling scenes of sexual degradation in Guerrillas and A Bend in the River; and Peter Matthiessen was not asked about his work as a CIA agent in Paris in the early 1950s, during which time he founded The Paris Review [see Sherman, "In His League," February 2, 2009]. Indeed, Philip Roth is one of the few writers in the Paris Review interview series who allowed substantial criticism of his oeuvre into the final transcript, which resulted in an unusually supple and invigorating interview.

Since 1953 The Paris Review has printed more than 300 interviews. Some are cringe-inducing: Cynthia Ozick offers a master class in self-pity and narcissism. Some are marred by macho posturing: William Styron felt compelled to single out a "fairy axis" wing in American fiction. Some are diminished by excessive timidity on the part of the interviewer, as when Plimpton could barely string questions together in the presence of his hero, Hemingway. And some interviewers behaved like paparazzi: Jan Morris endured numerous questions from Leo Lerman about her sex-change operation.

But hardly any PR interviews are humdrum; many are extremely impressive, and a few are perfect. Consider Harold Flender’s 1968 conversation with Isaac Bashevis Singer. Like many PR interviews, it has a pithy, evocative introduction: "Singer works at a small, cluttered desk in the living room…. His name is still listed in the Manhattan telephone directory, and hardly a day goes by without his receiving several calls from strangers who have read something he has written and want to talk to him about it. Until recently, he would invite anyone who called for lunch, or at least coffee…. He loves birds and has two pet parakeets who fly about his apartment uncaged." After recounting his difficult early years in New York during the Depression ("Take such a thing as the subway—we didn’t have a subway in Poland. And we didn’t have a name for it in Yiddish"), Singer goes on to describe a literary "misfortune" he sidestepped as a young writer:

[The modern Yiddish writer] was brought up with the idea that one should get out of Jewishness and become universal. And because he tried so hard to become universal, he became very provincial. This is the tragedy…. They told me, Why do you write about devils and imps? Why don’t you write about the situation of the Jews, about Zionism, about socialism, about the unions, and about how the tailors must get a raise, and so on and so on?… But young writers are sometimes very stubborn. I refused to go their way.
 INTERVIEWER: Don’t you believe in a better world?
  Singer: I believe in a better world, but I don’t think that a fiction writer who sits down to write a novel to make a better world can achieve anything. The better world will be done by many people, by the politicians, by the statesmen, by the sociologists. I don’t know who is going to create it or if there will ever be a better world. One thing I am sure is that the novelists will not do it.

In its seamless flow, sly meanderings and subtle humor, the interview reads like a short story by Singer himself, as all parties involved doubtless intended. By the end of the interview, one feels that interviewer Harold Flender, a writer and filmmaker who died in 1975, and PR‘s editors have captured the essence of Singer, and that there is not much more to say about the man and his work.

Nearly all of the PR interviews emphasize matters of craft and composition; every hammer, nail and wrench in the writer’s toolbox is removed for inspection. Some writers are exasperated by the approach: William Gaddis, in his 1987 interview, discouraged his interlocutor from boring him with "talk-show pap" like "on which side of the paper do you write?" But the same questions, with minor variations, reappear in all the interviews: How many hours a day do you write? ("Eleven to one continuously is a very good day’s work. Then you can read and play tennis or snooker. Two hours." —Martin Amis.) Do you prefer a pencil, a pen or a machine? ("Lined Bristol cards and well sharpened, not too hard, pencils capped with erasers." —Vladimir Nabokov.) Where do you store a gestating manuscript? ("Another thing I need to do, when I’m near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it." —Joan Didion.)

But the best interviews in the series glide past the customary questions about craft and expose a rich vein of material that any serious biographer would be elated to possess. James M. Cain suggested that his literary embrace of the vernacular—his most famous novel begins, "They threw me off the hay truck about noon"—was a rebellion against his father, a prim college president who insisted on polite and proper English usage: "The first man…who enchanted me not only by what he told me but by how he talked, was Ike Newton, who put in the brick wall over at Washington College, right after my father became president." Don DeLillo reflected on the research he did for Libra: "I went to New Orleans, Dallas, Fort Worth and Miami and looked at houses and streets and hospitals, schools and libraries—this is mainly Oswald I’m tracking but others as well—and after a while the characters in my mind and in my notebooks came out into the world." E.L. Doctorow recalled the moment he knew he had brought The Book of Daniel to fruition. He gave his wife the manuscript and went for a long walk on the beach in southern California: "I came back to the house in the late afternoon, the house in shadows now, and there was Helen sitting in the same chair and the manuscript was all piled upside down on the table and she couldn’t speak; she was crying, there were these enormous tears running down her cheeks."

The finest PR interviews throw open, to a certain extent, the elusive gates of creativity. The interview with Salman Rushdie excavates childhood experiences in which the writerly imagination was seeded. Rushdie recalls a trip to the high mountains of Kashmir when he was 12. When his family arrived at the guesthouse, they discovered that the pony carrying the food had gone missing. A guide was dispatched to the local village to request food and was rebuffed, which drove Mrs. Rushdie to despair:

About an hour later we saw this procession of a half-dozen people coming up from the village, bringing food. The village headman came up to us and said, I want to apologize to you, because when we told the guy there wasn’t any food we thought you were a Hindu family. But, he said, when we heard it was a Muslim family we had to bring food. We won’t accept any payment, and we apologize for having been so discourteous.

Some of the interviews pinpoint the precise moment a writer discovers the work of a lifetime. In his extraordinary 1985 interview with PR‘s Jeanne McCulloch, biographer Leon Edel described his precocious journey through Paris and London in the 1920s in search of material on Henry James, a quest that brought him face to face with Edith Wharton, Ford Madox Ford and George Bernard Shaw. Edel soon obtained a doctorate from the Sorbonne, but the Depression forced him to work in journalism for the next seventeen years. And then he visited the Widener Library at Harvard:

I found myself one day in a long underground room with very long tables and boxes and trunks and papers and letters everywhere: William James to Henry, Henry to William, Alice to her brothers, all neatly lined up, also letters of mama and papa James, piles of manuscripts, assorted books, and a large wooden box like an army footlocker labeled "Henry James." The secretary in charge said as far as she knew it had never been opened. I opened it.

PR interviewers are given a long leash to nourish their curiosities: "interviewer: Did you or Jonathan Cape put the comma in the title of the English edition [of Run River]? Didion: It comes back to me that Cape put the comma in." But the questions generally move in productive directions. "interviewer: What about Rinehart? Is he related to Rinehart in the blues tradition, or Django Reinhardt, the jazz musician?" Ralph Ellison, interviewed in 1955, replied:

My old Oklahoma friend, Jimmy Rushing, the blues singer, used to sing one song with a refrain that went:

Rinehart, Rinehart,
it’s so lonesome up here
on Beacon Hill,

which haunted me, and as I was thinking of a character who was a master of disguise, of coincidence, this name with its suggestion of inner and outer came to my mind. Later I learned that it was a call used by Harvard students when they prepared to riot, a call to chaos. Which is very interesting, because it is not long after Rinehart appears in my novel that the riot breaks out in Harlem.

Some writers open their hearts to eulogize lost friends and salute cherished literary influences. James Salter’s tribute to Robert Phelps, a founder of Grove Press and a scholar of Colette, is powerful: "[Earthly Paradise] is a wonderful book. I had a copy of it that he inscribed to me. My oldest daughter died in an accident, and I buried it with her because she loved it too." A 1966 interview with Saul Bellow begins unexpectedly with a stirring tribute to an unfashionable writer:

The development of realism in the nineteenth century is still the major event of modern literature. Dreiser, a realist of course, had elements of genius. He was clumsy, cumbersome, and in some respects a poor thinker. But he was rich in a kind of feeling that has been ruled off the grounds by many contemporary writers—the kind of feeling that every human being intuitively recognizes as primary…. He somehow conveys, without much refinement, depths of feeling that we usually associate with Balzac or Shakespeare.

The emotional register of the interviews is exceedingly wide, and not always solemn. Some writers, moved by a spirit of mischief, whimsy or revenge, initiate counterstrikes against book reviewers. William Gaddis remarked in 1987:

The daily reviewer for The New York Times was relieved because [Carpenter’s Gothic] was short, so I believe he actually read it. Though he reviewed JR ten years before, in reviewing Carpenter’s Gothic he said he had not read JR—couldn’t follow it, too long and complicated. That kind of irresponsibility doesn’t cheer a writer up, but, of course, these things are not on my mind when I’m working.

Writers are given the chance to illuminate, from oblique angles, close personal relationships. Elizabeth Hardwick commented on Robert Lowell’s taste in women: "He liked women writers and I don’t think he ever had a true interest in a woman who wasn’t a writer—an odd turn-on indeed and one I’ve noticed not greatly shared."

For this four-volume Picador edition—which includes the famous reproductions of manuscript pages at the head of the Q&As but not the original photographs of the authors—Gourevitch was obliged to choose sixty-four interviews from the PR canon. Many of his choices reveal judicious taste and sound judgment: Ezra Pound, Truman Capote, James Baldwin, Dorothy Parker, Eudora Welty, Jorge Luis Borges, Alice Munro, John Ashbery and Toni Morrison, as well as Bellow, Singer, Ellison, Roth and Rushdie. Gourevitch has done his homework: he wisely passed over certain Q&As that don’t soar—with Robert Penn Warren, Doris Lessing and Milan Kundera, for instance—and he rightly selected Didion’s 2006 interview rather than a weaker one from 1978. (Only a handful of authors were interviewed twice.) Some of the writers that Gourevitch has included—James M. Cain, Evelyn Waugh, Philip Larkin and Isak Dinesen—were caught in the final years of their lives, and these interviews lend a melancholy, autumnal mood to the collection. The interview with Dinesen, conducted in Rome in 1956, is especially memorable: "I feel that the world is happy and splendid and goes on but that I’m not part of it. I’ve come to Rome to try and get into the world again. Oh, look at the sky now!" (She died in 1962.)

Gourevitch has rescued at least one masterpiece from the PR archives: Marina Warner’s 1981 interview with Rebecca West (1892–1983). Today West is best known for her monumental nonfiction book on Yugoslavia, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), but she also wrote celebrated books on St. Augustine and the Nuremberg trials, in addition to four collections of essays and seven novels. The interview imparts to the reader West’s wit, elegance, lucidity, iconoclasm and breathtaking memory:

If I wanted to write anything that attacked anybody, I used to have a look at [Mark Twain’s] attack on Christian Science, which is beautifully written. He was a man of very great shrewdness. The earliest article on the Nazis, on Nazism, a sort of first foretaste, a prophetic view of the war, was an article by Mark Twain in Harper’s in, I should think, the nineties. He went to listen to the Parliament in Vienna and he describes an awful row and what the point of view of Luger, the Lord Mayor, was, and the man called George Schwartz, I think, who started the first Nazi paper, and what it must all lead to. It’s beautifully done. It’s the very first notice that I’ve ever found of the Austrian Nazi party, that started it all.

While the voices of novelists and poets echo through these new volumes, Gourevitch has not neglected PR‘s tradition of occasionally sitting down with critics and editors. Antonio Weiss’s lengthy 1991 Q&A with Harold Bloom is a pungent, exhilarating ride, and a stirring defense of close reading against the encroachments of arid literary theory. When discussing what Bloom calls "the younger members of my profession…the gender and power freaks," the critic becomes a one-man firing squad: "I realized in latish middle age that, no better or worse, I was surrounded by a pride of displaced social workers, a rabblement of lemmings, all rushing down to the sea carrying their subject down to destruction with them." The 1994 interview with former Alfred A. Knopf and New Yorker editor Robert Gottlieb bends the format: the Q&A is augmented by interviews with writers Gottlieb has edited over the years, among them Toni Morrison, Mordecai Richler and John le Carré, who said, "Occasionally I’ll say I disagree, in which case we will leave the matter in suspense until I recognize that he is right. In no case have I ever regretted taking Bob’s advice. In all the large things, he’s always been right." Gottlieb lacks Bloom’s verbal stamina, but he doesn’t hide his views. On what writers want: "A quick response…it’s cruelty to animals to keep them waiting." On an "amazing revelation" he had at age 40: "It suddenly came to me that not every person in the world assumed, without thinking about it, that reading was the most important thing in life." On his vocation: "I have fixed more sentences than most people have read in their lives." One senses that Gottlieb is a private man, and that his PR interview is the fullest portrait of him that we are likely to read.

Gourevitch has filled these volumes with riches, but his stewardship of the project is not without blemishes. In his introduction to Volume One, he all but neglects to explain the criteria by which he made his selections, and some of those choices are perplexing. Lackluster Q&As with Hemingway, Styron and Graham Greene are here, while sprightly and revealing sessions with John Updike, Mary McCarthy and Tennessee Williams are not. The interviews with V.S. Naipaul, Richard Price, Paul Auster, Peter Carey, Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King and Maya Angelou, all of which made the cut, are not without interest, but in terms of liveliness and overall quality they are inferior to the sessions with Nabokov, Neruda, Hardwick, Doctorow, DeLillo, Salter and Edel, to name just a few authors locked out of these four volumes. As you stroll through the collection, the questions accumulate. Why include an interview with Georges Simenon but not one with Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who is cited as a principal influence by many writers in PR‘s interview series? Why did Gourevitch include a 1998 interview with Martin Amis when the 1975 Q&A with his father, Kingsley, is funnier? Why include Harold Pinter but not Tom Stoppard? Why Haruki Murakami instead of Kazuo Ishiguro? Why Jack Gilbert but not W.H. Auden? Perhaps only commercial considerations can explain the inclusion of García Márquez and the exclusion of Octavio Paz, whose 1991 interview with Alfred Mac Adam is far more satisfying and revealing.

As the journal’s longtime editor, George Plimpton had literary tastes that leaned toward the conventional, but The Paris Review interview series did not ignore writers who might be considered experimental or "difficult": José Saramago, William Gass, John Barth, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Julio Cortázar, Stanley Elkin, Carlos Fuentes and Javier Marías have all been interviewed by PR. None were selected by Gourevitch; the experimental wing of fiction has been neglected in the Picador volumes. Thomas LeClair’s 1977 interview with William Gass, a kind of aesthete’s manifesto and a vivid portrait in self-loathing, was celebrated around the time of its publication. Is it perhaps too dark and bawdy for Gourevitch’s taste? "interviewer: Have you spent a good part of your writing life getting even? Gass: Yes…yes. Getting even is one great reason for writing." Gass then cites a line from his story "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country": "I want to rise so high that when I shit I won’t miss anybody." An especially glaring omission is the 1982 interview with New Directions founder James Laughlin, in which he recounted his relationships with Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, and reflected on his wealthy father: "If I asked him for money, he’d say, ‘Are you going to publish some more of those books that I can’t understand?’ And I’d say, ‘Yes.’ And he’d give it to me."

Obviously Gourevitch faced knotty choices in compiling these volumes. Still, one is left with the feeling that he has leaned too far in the direction of the genteel and the mainstream. These are polite volumes for our polite literary culture—a tidy, tranquil village instead of a sprawling, bustling city.

When The Paris Review appeared in 1953, its format was familiar to aficionados of literary periodicals: the first issue featured poems, short fiction and a pair of essays on trends in French and Italian literature. But there was one surprise: a thirteen-page Q&A with E.M. Forster, headed by an image of a manuscript page of thirty-three dense lines of spidery script, beginning with the words "Gentlemen. Gentlemen," culled from an unfinished novel. The interview itself, conducted in Forster’s high-ceilinged rooms at King’s College, Cambridge, was refreshingly blunt. "interviewers: [We] have also never felt comfortable about Leonard Bast’s seduction of Helen in Howards End…it came off allegorically but not realistically. Forster: I think you may be right." Subsequent Q&As with Dorothy Parker, William Faulkner, James Thurber, Nelson Algren and Truman Capote helped to establish The Paris Review as a vibrant new literary periodical, and Ernest Hemingway remarked, "I have all the copies of The Paris Review and like the interviews very much. They will make a good book when collected."

The first collection of those interviews, titled Writers at Work, was published by Viking Press in 1958. A second volume, featuring Q&As with Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and Mary McCarthy, appeared in 1963. More than a dozen other volumes would follow, and the editors eventually expanded the series to include discussions with playwrights, biographers, nonfiction luminaries, editors and the occasional literary critic; but novelists would always remain at the heart of the enterprise. Nearly all of the interviews were overseen by George Plimpton, who, until his death in 2003, edited the transcripts (and the published collections, most of which are now out of print) with devotion and dramatic flair.

In the decades that followed the journal’s debut, perhaps only the Q&As in Playboy equaled its own in quality and reputation. But the two publications adhered to very different editorial practices and procedures. The Playboy interviews were often combative and controversial, and Playboy‘s editors were not generally inclined to defer to the needs and whims of the subject during the editing process. (Playboy, moreover, did not limit its Q&As to literary figures: the magazine published interviews, up to 25,000 words in length, with Malcolm X, Jimmy Hoffa, Bertrand Russell, Fidel Castro, Albert Speer and John Lennon.)

The Paris Review settled on a more conciliatory approach. As Philip Gourevitch explains in his introduction to a new edition of Paris Review interviews, a four-volume compilation of greatest hits, "A Paris Review
interview is always a collaboration, not a confrontation…. The purpose is not to catch writers off guard, but to elicit from them the fullest possible reckoning of what interests them most." To guarantee that outcome, editors have always granted the subject final approval of the transcript. Gourevitch, a distinguished reporter who recently completed a five-year stint as PR‘s editor, admits that its protocols are "unapologetically at odds with journalistic practice."

The logistics of a PR interview varied widely. Herbert Gold mailed questions to Vladimir Nabokov at the Montreux-Palace Hotel in Switzerland. When Gold arrived at the hotel, he found an envelope waiting for him: "the questions had been shaken up and transformed into an interview." Saul Bellow polished the transcript in hamburger joints and on park benches near the University of Chicago. Don DeLillo answered questions at an Anselm Kiefer exhibition in Manhattan and in "a comically posh bar." Cynthia Ozick sat at her dining room table with a typewriter and spontaneously typed out answers to questions posed by an interviewer seated a few feet away. Jorge Luis Borges met PR in a "large, ornate, high-ceilinged chamber" at the National Library in Buenos Aires, surrounded by Piranesi’s etchings. Pablo Neruda was interviewed on a stone bench facing the sea at his home in Isla Negra, Chile.

In the introduction to her 1984 interview with Philip Roth, Hermione Lee outlined a process that she says she found "extremely interesting": in the summer of 1983 she spoke with Roth for a day and a half in his room at the Royal Automobile Club in Pall Mall, after which he revised the transcripts she sent him. Roth and Lee continued their dialogue in early 1984, and again Roth went to work on the transcript—processing "raw chunks of talk" into "stylish, energetic, concentrated prose." Intricate sentences were spawned: "Any satirist writing a futuristic novel who had imagined a President Reagan during the Eisenhower years would have been accused of perpetrating a piece of crude, contemptible, adolescent, anti-American wickedness, when in fact he would have succeeded as prophetic sentry just where Orwell failed." Lee referred dryly to her published interview with Roth as "Philip Roth’s presentation of himself."

The problem is that when people present themselves, a great deal of material is left out, and the moral, intellectual and biographical contours of the interview are substantially altered. Reading the finished transcript of a Paris Review interview, it’s not difficult to detect what has been omitted: Norman Mailer, in two interviews forty years apart, was not asked why he stabbed his second wife, Adele, in their Manhattan apartment in November 1960; Louis-Ferdinand Céline was not asked about his fascist and anti-Semitic pronouncements in the 1930s and ’40s; Doris Lessing was not asked about her life-altering experiences in the Communist Party; Gabriel García Márquez was not asked about his cozy relationship with Fidel Castro (for a splendidly combative interview with the Colombian master, excavate Claudia Dreifus’s 1982 Q&A in Playboy); V.S. Naipaul was not asked about the chilling scenes of sexual degradation in Guerrillas and A Bend in the River; and Peter Matthiessen was not asked about his work as a CIA agent in Paris in the early 1950s, during which time he founded The Paris Review [see Sherman, "In His League," February 2, 2009]. Indeed, Philip Roth is one of the few writers in the Paris Review interview series who allowed substantial criticism of his oeuvre into the final transcript, which resulted in an unusually supple and invigorating interview.

Since 1953 The Paris Review has printed more than 300 interviews. Some are cringe-inducing: Cynthia Ozick offers a master class in self-pity and narcissism. Some are marred by macho posturing: William Styron felt compelled to single out a "fairy axis" wing in American fiction. Some are diminished by excessive timidity on the part of the interviewer, as when Plimpton could barely string questions together in the presence of his hero, Hemingway. And some interviewers behaved like paparazzi: Jan Morris endured numerous questions from Leo Lerman about her sex-change operation.

But hardly any PR interviews are humdrum; many are extremely impressive, and a few are perfect. Consider Harold Flender’s 1968 conversation with Isaac Bashevis Singer. Like many PR interviews, it has a pithy, evocative introduction: "Singer works at a small, cluttered desk in the living room…. His name is still listed in the Manhattan telephone directory, and hardly a day goes by without his receiving several calls from strangers who have read something he has written and want to talk to him about it. Until recently, he would invite anyone who called for lunch, or at least coffee…. He loves birds and has two pet parakeets who fly about his apartment uncaged." After recounting his difficult early years in New York during the Depression ("Take such a thing as the subway—we didn’t have a subway in Poland. And we didn’t have a name for it in Yiddish"), Singer goes on to describe a literary "misfortune" he sidestepped as a young writer:

[The modern Yiddish writer] was brought up with the idea that one should get out of Jewishness and become universal. And because he tried so hard to become universal, he became very provincial. This is the tragedy…. They told me, Why do you write about devils and imps? Why don’t you write about the situation of the Jews, about Zionism, about socialism, about the unions, and about how the tailors must get a raise, and so on and so on?… But young writers are sometimes very stubborn. I refused to go their way.
 INTERVIEWER: Don’t you believe in a better world?
  Singer: I believe in a better world, but I don’t think that a fiction writer who sits down to write a novel to make a better world can achieve anything. The better world will be done by many people, by the politicians, by the statesmen, by the sociologists. I don’t know who is going to create it or if there will ever be a better world. One thing I am sure is that the novelists will not do it.

In its seamless flow, sly meanderings and subtle humor, the interview reads like a short story by Singer himself, as all parties involved doubtless intended. By the end of the interview, one feels that interviewer Harold Flender, a writer and filmmaker who died in 1975, and PR‘s editors have captured the essence of Singer, and that there is not much more to say about the man and his work.

Nearly all of the PR interviews emphasize matters of craft and composition; every hammer, nail and wrench in the writer’s toolbox is removed for inspection. Some writers are exasperated by the approach: William Gaddis, in his 1987 interview, discouraged his interlocutor from boring him with "talk-show pap" like "on which side of the paper do you write?" But the same questions, with minor variations, reappear in all the interviews: How many hours a day do you write? ("Eleven to one continuously is a very good day’s work. Then you can read and play tennis or snooker. Two hours." —Martin Amis.) Do you prefer a pencil, a pen or a machine? ("Lined Bristol cards and well sharpened, not too hard, pencils capped with erasers." —Vladimir Nabokov.) Where do you store a gestating manuscript? ("Another thing I need to do, when I’m near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it." —Joan Didion.)

But the best interviews in the series glide past the customary questions about craft and expose a rich vein of material that any serious biographer would be elated to possess. James M. Cain suggested that his literary embrace of the vernacular—his most famous novel begins, "They threw me off the hay truck about noon"—was a rebellion against his father, a prim college president who insisted on polite and proper English usage: "The first man…who enchanted me not only by what he told me but by how he talked, was Ike Newton, who put in the brick wall over at Washington College, right after my father became president." Don DeLillo reflected on the research he did for Libra: "I went to New Orleans, Dallas, Fort Worth and Miami and looked at houses and streets and hospitals, schools and libraries—this is mainly Oswald I’m tracking but others as well—and after a while the characters in my mind and in my notebooks came out into the world." E.L. Doctorow recalled the moment he knew he had brought The Book of Daniel to fruition. He gave his wife the manuscript and went for a long walk on the beach in southern California: "I came back to the house in the late afternoon, the house in shadows now, and there was Helen sitting in the same chair and the manuscript was all piled upside down on the table and she couldn’t speak; she was crying, there were these enormous tears running down her cheeks."

The finest PR interviews throw open, to a certain extent, the elusive gates of creativity. The interview with Salman Rushdie excavates childhood experiences in which the writerly imagination was seeded. Rushdie recalls a trip to the high mountains of Kashmir when he was 12. When his family arrived at the guesthouse, they discovered that the pony carrying the food had gone missing. A guide was dispatched to the local village to request food and was rebuffed, which drove Mrs. Rushdie to despair:

About an hour later we saw this procession of a half-dozen people coming up from the village, bringing food. The village headman came up to us and said, I want to apologize to you, because when we told the guy there wasn’t any food we thought you were a Hindu family. But, he said, when we heard it was a Muslim family we had to bring food. We won’t accept any payment, and we apologize for having been so discourteous.

Some of the interviews pinpoint the precise moment a writer discovers the work of a lifetime. In his extraordinary 1985 interview with PR‘s Jeanne McCulloch, biographer Leon Edel described his precocious journey through Paris and London in the 1920s in search of material on Henry James, a quest that brought him face to face with Edith Wharton, Ford Madox Ford and George Bernard Shaw. Edel soon obtained a doctorate from the Sorbonne, but the Depression forced him to work in journalism for the next seventeen years. And then he visited the Widener Library at Harvard:

I found myself one day in a long underground room with very long tables and boxes and trunks and papers and letters everywhere: William James to Henry, Henry to William, Alice to her brothers, all neatly lined up, also letters of mama and papa James, piles of manuscripts, assorted books, and a large wooden box like an army footlocker labeled "Henry James." The secretary in charge said as far as she knew it had never been opened. I opened it.

PR interviewers are given a long leash to nourish their curiosities: "interviewer: Did you or Jonathan Cape put the comma in the title of the English edition [of Run River]? Didion: It comes back to me that Cape put the comma in." But the questions generally move in productive directions. "interviewer: What about Rinehart? Is he related to Rinehart in the blues tradition, or Django Reinhardt, the jazz musician?" Ralph Ellison, interviewed in 1955, replied:

My old Oklahoma friend, Jimmy Rushing, the blues singer, used to sing one song with a refrain that went:

Rinehart, Rinehart,
it’s so lonesome up here
on Beacon Hill,

which haunted me, and as I was thinking of a character who was a master of disguise, of coincidence, this name with its suggestion of inner and outer came to my mind. Later I learned that it was a call used by Harvard students when they prepared to riot, a call to chaos. Which is very interesting, because it is not long after Rinehart appears in my novel that the riot breaks out in Harlem.

Some writers open their hearts to eulogize lost friends and salute cherished literary influences. James Salter’s tribute to Robert Phelps, a founder of Grove Press and a scholar of Colette, is powerful: "[Earthly Paradise] is a wonderful book. I had a copy of it that he inscribed to me. My oldest daughter died in an accident, and I buried it with her because she loved it too." A 1966 interview with Saul Bellow begins unexpectedly with a stirring tribute to an unfashionable writer:

The development of realism in the nineteenth century is still the major event of modern literature. Dreiser, a realist of course, had elements of genius. He was clumsy, cumbersome, and in some respects a poor thinker. But he was rich in a kind of feeling that has been ruled off the grounds by many contemporary writers—the kind of feeling that every human being intuitively recognizes as primary…. He somehow conveys, without much refinement, depths of feeling that we usually associate with Balzac or Shakespeare.

The emotional register of the interviews is exceedingly wide, and not always solemn. Some writers, moved by a spirit of mischief, whimsy or revenge, initiate counterstrikes against book reviewers. William Gaddis remarked in 1987:

The daily reviewer for The New York Times was relieved because [Carpenter’s Gothic] was short, so I believe he actually read it. Though he reviewed JR ten years before, in reviewing Carpenter’s Gothic he said he had not read JR—couldn’t follow it, too long and complicated. That kind of irresponsibility doesn’t cheer a writer up, but, of course, these things are not on my mind when I’m working.

Writers are given the chance to illuminate, from oblique angles, close personal relationships. Elizabeth Hardwick commented on Robert Lowell’s taste in women: "He liked women writers and I don’t think he ever had a true interest in a woman who wasn’t a writer—an odd turn-on indeed and one I’ve noticed not greatly shared."

For this four-volume Picador edition—which includes the famous reproductions of manuscript pages at the head of the Q&As but not the original photographs of the authors—Gourevitch was obliged to choose sixty-four interviews from the PR canon. Many of his choices reveal judicious taste and sound judgment: Ezra Pound, Truman Capote, James Baldwin, Dorothy Parker, Eudora Welty, Jorge Luis Borges, Alice Munro, John Ashbery and Toni Morrison, as well as Bellow, Singer, Ellison, Roth and Rushdie. Gourevitch has done his homework: he wisely passed over certain Q&As that don’t soar—with Robert Penn Warren, Doris Lessing and Milan Kundera, for instance—and he rightly selected Didion’s 2006 interview rather than a weaker one from 1978. (Only a handful of authors were interviewed twice.) Some of the writers that Gourevitch has included—James M. Cain, Evelyn Waugh, Philip Larkin and Isak Dinesen—were caught in the final years of their lives, and these interviews lend a melancholy, autumnal mood to the collection. The interview with Dinesen, conducted in Rome in 1956, is especially memorable: "I feel that the world is happy and splendid and goes on but that I’m not part of it. I’ve come to Rome to try and get into the world again. Oh, look at the sky now!" (She died in 1962.)

Gourevitch has rescued at least one masterpiece from the PR archives: Marina Warner’s 1981 interview with Rebecca West (1892–1983). Today West is best known for her monumental nonfiction book on Yugoslavia, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), but she also wrote celebrated books on St. Augustine and the Nuremberg trials, in addition to four collections of essays and seven novels. The interview imparts to the reader West’s wit, elegance, lucidity, iconoclasm and breathtaking memory:

If I wanted to write anything that attacked anybody, I used to have a look at [Mark Twain’s] attack on Christian Science, which is beautifully written. He was a man of very great shrewdness. The earliest article on the Nazis, on Nazism, a sort of first foretaste, a prophetic view of the war, was an article by Mark Twain in Harper’s in, I should think, the nineties. He went to listen to the Parliament in Vienna and he describes an awful row and what the point of view of Luger, the Lord Mayor, was, and the man called George Schwartz, I think, who started the first Nazi paper, and what it must all lead to. It’s beautifully done. It’s the very first notice that I’ve ever found of the Austrian Nazi party, that started it all.

While the voices of novelists and poets echo through these new volumes, Gourevitch has not neglected PR‘s tradition of occasionally sitting down with critics and editors. Antonio Weiss’s lengthy 1991 Q&A with Harold Bloom is a pungent, exhilarating ride, and a stirring defense of close reading against the encroachments of arid literary theory. When discussing what Bloom calls "the younger members of my profession…the gender and power freaks," the critic becomes a one-man firing squad: "I realized in latish middle age that, no better or worse, I was surrounded by a pride of displaced social workers, a rabblement of lemmings, all rushing down to the sea carrying their subject down to destruction with them." The 1994 interview with former Alfred A. Knopf and New Yorker editor Robert Gottlieb bends the format: the Q&A is augmented by interviews with writers Gottlieb has edited over the years, among them Toni Morrison, Mordecai Richler and John le Carré, who said, "Occasionally I’ll say I disagree, in which case we will leave the matter in suspense until I recognize that he is right. In no case have I ever regretted taking Bob’s advice. In all the large things, he’s always been right." Gottlieb lacks Bloom’s verbal stamina, but he doesn’t hide his views. On what writers want: "A quick response…it’s cruelty to animals to keep them waiting." On an "amazing revelation" he had at age 40: "It suddenly came to me that not every person in the world assumed, without thinking about it, that reading was the most important thing in life." On his vocation: "I have fixed more sentences than most people have read in their lives." One senses that Gottlieb is a private man, and that his PR interview is the fullest portrait of him that we are likely to read.

Gourevitch has filled these volumes with riches, but his stewardship of the project is not without blemishes. In his introduction to Volume One, he all but neglects to explain the criteria by which he made his selections, and some of those choices are perplexing. Lackluster Q&As with Hemingway, Styron and Graham Greene are here, while sprightly and revealing sessions with John Updike, Mary McCarthy and Tennessee Williams are not. The interviews with V.S. Naipaul, Richard Price, Paul Auster, Peter Carey, Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King and Maya Angelou, all of which made the cut, are not without interest, but in terms of liveliness and overall quality they are inferior to the sessions with Nabokov, Neruda, Hardwick, Doctorow, DeLillo, Salter and Edel, to name just a few authors locked out of these four volumes. As you stroll through the collection, the questions accumulate. Why include an interview with Georges Simenon but not one with Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who is cited as a principal influence by many writers in PR‘s interview series? Why did Gourevitch include a 1998 interview with Martin Amis when the 1975 Q&A with his father, Kingsley, is funnier? Why include Harold Pinter but not Tom Stoppard? Why Haruki Murakami instead of Kazuo Ishiguro? Why Jack Gilbert but not W.H. Auden? Perhaps only commercial considerations can explain the inclusion of García Márquez and the exclusion of Octavio Paz, whose 1991 interview with Alfred Mac Adam is far more satisfying and revealing.

As the journal’s longtime editor, George Plimpton had literary tastes that leaned toward the conventional, but The Paris Review interview series did not ignore writers who might be considered experimental or "difficult": José Saramago, William Gass, John Barth, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Julio Cortázar, Stanley Elkin, Carlos Fuentes and Javier Marías have all been interviewed by PR. None were selected by Gourevitch; the experimental wing of fiction has been neglected in the Picador volumes. Thomas LeClair’s 1977 interview with William Gass, a kind of aesthete’s manifesto and a vivid portrait in self-loathing, was celebrated around the time of its publication. Is it perhaps too dark and bawdy for Gourevitch’s taste? "interviewer: Have you spent a good part of your writing life getting even? Gass: Yes…yes. Getting even is one great reason for writing." Gass then cites a line from his story "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country": "I want to rise so high that when I shit I won’t miss anybody." An especially glaring omission is the 1982 interview with New Directions founder James Laughlin, in which he recounted his relationships with Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, and reflected on his wealthy father: "If I asked him for money, he’d say, ‘Are you going to publish some more of those books that I can’t understand?’ And I’d say, ‘Yes.’ And he’d give it to me."

Obviously Gourevitch faced knotty choices in compiling these volumes. Still, one is left with the feeling that he has leaned too far in the direction of the genteel and the mainstream. These are polite volumes for our polite literary culture—a tidy, tranquil village instead of a sprawling, bustling city.

AVENGING ANGELS

In the upper ranks of American newspaper editors, Eugene Roberts is a highly regarded figure: under his stewardship in the 1970s and ’80s, the Philadelphia Inquirer won seventeen Pulitzer Prizes in eighteen years. Last spring, while researching a piece about Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of the Wall Street Journal, a reporter for The Atlantic contacted Roberts and found him in a pessimistic frame of mind: “Murdoch says he wants to turn it into something more like the New York Times,” Roberts said, “but I suspect it will end up looking more like USA Today.”

I recently phoned Roberts and asked him if the Wall Street Journal had, in fact, emerged as a replica of Gannett’s USA Today. Roberts retreated from his earlier remark and made it clear, in his low-key manner, that he admires Murdoch’s Journal: “I’ve been impressed with what I’ve seen so far,” he told me. “There is more foreign reporting. It’s more of a general-interest newspaper. On the whole they are doing a good job of pursuing political and national stories fairly and accurately.”

Indeed, Murdoch’s Journal is winning praise from many quarters. “I think it’s better,” says Walter Pincus of the Washington Post. “They’re printing more stories. Their coverage of Washington has expanded.” Says columnist E.J. Dionne Jr.: “I am reading the new Journal with great pleasure because business and economic news is now everybody’s news and because they continue to have some first-rate political reporting.” “The Journal is a much improved newspaper,” says Harold Evans, who clashed bitterly with Murdoch at the Times of London in 1981. “I think the way they’ve begun to cover politics and the extra space they’ve put into the paper–that’s all to the good. Let’s not underestimate the fact that this is a pretty massive investment that they are making.”

These comments come as something of a surprise: a great many soothsayers had predicted that Murdoch’s ownership would have regrettable, if not catastrophic, consequences for the newspaper. Murdoch stoked those fears: he joked with Time in June 2007, six months before he concluded his $5.6 billion acquisition of Dow Jones & Company, owner of the Journal, that he would put tabloid-style photos of half-naked women in its hallowed pages–provided those women had MBA degrees.

But the wrecking ball has not come to the Journal; sleaze has not invaded its pages; the most dire fears have not been realized. Murdoch has not extinguished quality writing at the paper; he has not transformed the China coverage to benefit his business interests in China; he has not terminated the paper’s superb coverage of art, photography, music, dance and theater; he has not murdered the “A-hed,” the quirky feature that has adorned Page 1 since 1941; and so on. Says Byron Calame, a deputy assistant managing editor of the Journal who went on to become public editor of the New York Times from 2005 to 2007: “I’m not aware of any corruption of the news standards.”

But the Journal has changed in very significant ways. Quite a few Journal watchers–including many people who left the paper but continue to care deeply about it–are reading it with disquiet and unease. They see a newspaper whose coverage of the financial crisis, while impressive in many respects, lacks analytical rigor; a newspaper that is running shorter articles; a newspaper whose copy-editing standards have declined; and a newspaper that is abandoning a rich tradition of long-form narrative journalism.

One picks up the Journal these days with relief and sadness–relief that the newspaper is not an amalgamation of the Murdoch-owned New York Post, Fox News and The Weekly Standard; and sadness that reporters who once wrote finely textured, emotionally affecting feature stories on a universe of subjects now produce, in too many cases, ordinary news stories. “Scoops” and “news” are the new Murdochian mantras, and reporters are generally expected to spend two or three weeks on a piece, not two or three months. Long-form journalism, says one reporter, is “less cherished, less savored” by the new regime led by Murdoch’s handpicked editor in chief, Robert Thomson, former editor of Murdoch’s Times of London. (Thomson declined to be interviewed for this article.)

“For decades the DNA of the Journal was this double helix: incredibly strong business reporting and incredibly strong narrative/analytical writing,” says Joshua Prager, a long-form reporter who recently left the newspaper after almost thirteen years. “But now they’ve ripped one of the strands out of it: narrative writing is all but gone. As a result, the Wall Street Journal has lost its soul.”

Others agree that long-form writing has taken a hit. “As a reader,” says Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, “I really miss the long, well-told narratives and ambitious investigative projects. Thomson decries that kind of journalism as a self-indulgence, although I think it brought the old Journal great respect and devotion.”

Murdoch has not corrupted the Journal. Instead, he has smothered it and made it ordinary. When Prager invokes the Journal‘s “soul,” he is referring to a tradition that was old-fashioned in the best sense, the sense that valued novelty, surprise and seriousness. An old copy of the Journal was a bit like an old copy of The New Yorker: one could pick it up months later and find something fresh, enduring and original. Today, if you pick up a month-old copy of the Journal, you will mostly find stale news.

Jim Sterba, who joined the Wall Street Journal in 1982 after sixteen unhappy years as a reporter at A.M. Rosenthal’s New York Times, captured the old Journal in his 2003 book Frankie’s Place: A Love Story.

Journal correspondents never wrote stories that began, “President Bhutto today denounced.” They never wrote a story from Vietnam as I often did for the Times that began: “B-52 bombers hit fresh suspected enemy strongholds south of the Demilitarized Zone today.” Journal correspondents went looking for their own stories, often wandering serendipitously across the landscape, going wherever the thread of an idea took them. They seemed to take as much time as they needed…. They could be subtle.

The serendipity and subtlety were principally displayed on Page 1, whose design called to mind newspapers of the nineteenth century: columns of undisturbed prose, accentuated by black-and-white line drawings, nestled beneath sly, multilayered headlines. (Photographs did not appear regularly until 2002.) Yet there was nothing antiquated about the writing: Page 1 was not primarily a venue for “hard news” and journalistic ephemera but a home for explanatory narrative, interpretation and storytelling. As a national newspaper, the Journal occupied a special niche: it was a “second read,” perused after the San Diego Union-Tribune or the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which in turn gave the Journal the freedom to focus on long-form, Page 1 “leders” in which reporters invested much of their time and energy, and by which they were judged and promoted. Erik Larson, Jane Mayer, Ron Suskind, James B. Stewart, Susan Faludi, Bryan Burrough, Alex Kotlowitz, Tony Horwitz and Geraldine Brooks are just some of the writers who launched their careers on Page 1 of the Journal.

At its best, in an epoch that future historians will view as a “golden age” for US newspapers, the Journal‘s front page excelled at various forms: explanatory reporting on politics, economics, science and social trends; deeply researched profiles of companies and executives; and investigative reporting. The Journal pursued General Motors, Mobil Oil, Occidental Petroleum, Texas Instruments, Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., Apple and hundreds of other corporations, which inspired Ralph Nader to proclaim that, aside from its “Pleistocene” editorial page, the Journal was “the most effective muckraking daily paper in the country…. the main reporter in our country of corporate crime.” (Nader’s words prompted Robert Sherrill to read an entire year of the Journal‘s corporate crime coverage for a Nation cover story in 1997.)

Finally, there was a remarkable tradition of immersion journalism: Alex Kotlowitz spent twelve weeks with a teenage boy and his family in the Henry Horner housing project in Chicago; Judith Valente lived for two months, around the clock, with a family whose son was wasting away from AIDS; Tony Horwitz took a job at a poultry plant in Mississippi to document the brutal conditions inside. This is not to say that Page 1 was flawless or that the Kotlowitz-type narratives were dominant. But they were never absent from the medley, and staffers clearly recall the words of former managing editor Paul Steiger, who led the paper from 1991 to 2007: “Go find stories with moral force.”

As time went on, there was less money to pay for those kinds of stories. Under the Bancroft family, Dow Jones was a financial powerhouse until the late 1980s. But advertising revenue never fully recovered from the crash of 1987, and austerity measures were imposed. Ad revenue plunged again after 9/11, and Dow Jones bled $8 million in 2002. Ken Auletta reported in The New Yorker that 1,700 Dow Jones employees were fired between 2000 and 2003–a series of blows, some contend, that weakened the quality of the long-form writing on Page 1. Recalls Byron Calame: “I don’t know how many years back, but people would say, ‘If the price of the stock goes any lower, Murdoch will grab us.’ That was not a remark anyone made with joy.”

On December 13, 2007, Rupert Murdoch marched into the Journal newsroom to deliver a victory oration. “It is a new day in the history of this company,” he said. “We’ve come here to expand it, to develop it and, where possible, to improve all of its products.” He concluded with these words: “You better get back to work and make sure you’re not scooped tomorrow.”

Why the new emphasis on scoops, news and speed? One reason, it seems, has to do with Murdoch’s stated goal of vanquishing the New York Times. Murdoch can’t easily do that in New York City, where the Times has deep loyalty and penetration. But he is obviously keen to persuade educated, affluent readers in San Diego or Atlanta to switch from the Times to the Journal. (The hiring of Thomas Frank, who writes a political column every Wednesday, can certainly be viewed as a play for liberal-minded Times readers.) But it must be said that the news-oriented approach at the Journal is not Murdoch’s innovation: faced with mounting competition in the 1970s and ’80s, Journal editors allowed more news to appear on Page 1, a trend that accelerated after 9/11, when the paper unveiled a major redesign of its front page that emphasized color and readability; critics howled that the page had been “neutered.”

A Murdochian business strategy that accelerates the news tempo of Page 1 has clearly resulted in fewer stories with “moral force.” But the approach has yielded some rich results nevertheless. The Journal‘s coverage of the terrorist assault on Mumbai in late November, for example, was a deeply impressive display of talent and resources; it is unlikely that the old Journal, with its feature-writing orientation, could have equaled it. Other examples abound: on March 3, when federal prosecutors announced that the CIA had destroyed ninety-two videotapes of interrogations of Al Qaeda suspects, the Journal put the story smack in the middle of Page 1; the New York Times ran it on Page A16.

Even critics of editor Robert Thomson admit that the Journal has scored a large number of scoops in the past year. Consider a March 4 Page 1 story headlined Merrill’s $10 Million Men, in which reporter Susanne Craig identified eleven Merrill Lynch executives who took home more than $10 million in 2008, a year when the firm’s net loss was $27.6 billion. New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo immediately issued subpoenas to several of the executives named in Craig’s article.

Yet on many other occasions the news approach of the Journal seems bland and shopworn. On February 17, Page 1 had two photographs of Shoichi Nakagawa, the Japanese finance minister whose comatose demeanor at a G-7 meeting in Rome generated criticism. But the accompanying story, buried deep inside the paper, was scant and lackluster. For some Journal veterans, this amounts to an attenuation of the newspaper’s historic identity. Referring to some recent Page 1 decisions, Calame says, “Putting a picture of an early play from the Super Bowl on top of Page 1, or putting A-Rod big and bold in the middle of the front page is not being unique–it’s being like everyone else.” (It should be noted that the Journal did not win any Pulitzers this year; the Times won five.)

Others welcome the new approach. “One of my complaints about my paper and the Times,” says the Washington Post‘s Walter Pincus, “is that we print too many long stories. People need time to read newspapers. They don’t spend a longer time on newspapers than they did forty years ago. It’s still twenty to twenty-five minutes.” Others raise the issue of quantity versus quality in the Journal. John Harwood, who now writes for the Times, spent sixteen years covering Washington for the Journal, during which time his mandate was not scoops and speed but analysis, brevity and explanatory reporting. “Now when I look at the Journal, I see too many stories,” Harwood says. “And I yearn for some of the synthesizing that we used to do.” For reporters at the paper today, he notes, “there is much more pressure to have more stories in the paper.”

The new emphasis on breaking news, combined with the paper’s historic expertise in business, should, theoretically, guarantee its supremacy in coverage of Wall Street corruption and the current financial implosion. In an interview with me, Ken Auletta described the Journal‘s recent economic reporting as “fearless.” But the Journal‘s performance has also drawn criticism. Writing on the website of the Columbia Journalism Review (where I am a contributing editor), Dean Starkman argued on December 24 that the Journal‘s financial coverage, compared with that of the New York Times and Bloomberg News, is “too incremental, overly geared toward those already in the know, and too willing to trade arms-length scrutiny for access.”

Starkman’s view is that the Times, Bloomberg and the Journal have displayed different angles of vision: “The Journal… understands it is reporting the greatest financial story of our lives. Bloomberg and the Times understand…that they are also reporting the greatest-ever financial scandal.” Reporters writing about scandals tend to punch harder and faster than reporters doing mere “stories.” Consider how the Journal and the Times have chosen to cover Robert Rubin’s tenure at Citigroup. In the November 23 Times, Eric Dash and Julie Creswell published a devastating exposé that highlighted Rubin’s responsibility for Citigroup’s woes. The piece, which ran on Page 1 of the Sunday edition, was written with unusual force, clarity and purpose. Six days later, the Journal ran a less detailed, more deferential article on the same subject.

For those who keep track, Starkman concluded with this scorecard: “The Journal has been beaten on Citi, Goldman, Paulson, the Federal Reserve bailout and AIG; it has won on the SEC, Lehman and Bear Stearns, and held its own on Fannie, Freddie, regulators and Greenspan.” A number of current and former Journal staffers interviewed for this article supported Starkman’s broad thesis: that the paper has, to some extent, ceded one of its main assets–the ability to undertake in-depth, explanatory reporting on the structural roots of the financial crisis–to Bloomberg News and the Times. Many Journal watchers cite a recent series in the Times titled “The Reckoning,” in which the Dash/Creswell article appeared, as a model of what the old Journal would have aspired to.

“What was great about the Journal was that it allowed people to pursue their different abilities,” says Joshua Prager, who recently accepted a buyout from the newspaper. “I’m good at writing long feature stories. I’m horrible at breaking news. They didn’t make me do that after a while. That’s why the paper worked.” I’m sitting with Prager at a restaurant in Upper Manhattan. It’s a gray morning in early March, and a cold rain is falling. Prager is a wiry, dark-haired man of 38 who, owing to a car accident, walks with a cane. In his post-Journal life, he intends to write a book about trauma and disability. What really matters now to Journal management, he says, is “breaking news and byline counts: the number of bylines that appear in a given year. So people are desperately churning out stories. You have incredibly talented reporters who could be writing beautiful pieces that are much more in depth. They are encouraged not to now.” (Prager admits that some reporters “whose talents lie in breaking news and following stories” have done well under the Murdoch/Thomson regime.)

The classic “leder” is clearly dying, but it has not vanished. Recent standouts include Yaroslav Trofimov on the rise of nonviolent resistance in Kashmir, José de Córdoba on the encroachment of drug cartels into the vital Mexican city of Monterrey, Justin Scheck on drug addiction counselors who become heroin addicts and Mark Maremont on a private equity con man. One can add to this list, and yet close observers agree that the paper is publishing fewer long-form, narrative-driven articles. Those that are published tend to appear in the Weekend Edition, published on Saturday. Murdoch told Time in 2007 that the Journal‘s longer, in-depth pieces should be held for the weekend. And to a large extent this has been done. Yet the lively weekend edition is not flourishing. When I asked Journal spokesman Robert Christie about the Saturday paper, he replied, “It’s expensive to run and deliver. It is not making the kind of money I think people had hoped it would make.” This is cause for concern: if the Journal ever decided for financial reasons to eliminate the Weekend Edition, those stories could be marooned.

As for the long pieces that still do appear, a subtle and disturbing shift has taken place: most of them are “on the news.” That makes sense, up to a point; newspaper readers want the latest information. But the most distinguished newspapers transcend the narrow boundaries of “news.” The old Journal certainly did. By and large, the articles that brought the most honor to the pre-Murdoch Journal were conceived with little thought to the news cycle.

To insist on a news component for long-form and investigative reporting, as Murdoch and Thomson are doing, is to evince a shallow understanding of–and a slight appreciation for–those fragile genres. One of the finest Journal leders I’ve read is “Life and Death,” Gary Fields’s 2005 profile of Richard “Grasshopper” Leggett, a 53-year-old carpenter at Angola Prison in Louisiana, who builds seven-foot coffins for his fellow inmates. Sentences like this bring the piece to life: “At Angola, funerals are elaborate affairs, with hand-made coffins pulled to graves by horse-drawn carriages, in rites conducted almost entirely by inmates.” In its emotional power, its tight, radiant language and its wide sweep, “Life and Death” reveals more about prison life than twenty ordinary newspaper stories. There isn’t much room for sparkling, poignant features about prison carpenters in today’s Journal.

But do Journal reporters of Fields’s caliber still feel they can do high-quality work outside that tradition? It’s a knotty question I attempted to answer by contacting them. One of the first Journal reporters I called was Jonathan Kaufman, who, over the course of a long career, has produced splendid leders on race, immigration and education: his work embodies the finest qualities of the old Journal. But Kaufman is leaving the Journal for Bloomberg News; he declined to speak with The Nation. I went on to contact twenty-nine staffers, including the most distinguished reporters and editors; not one would talk on the record, and only a few agreed to speak off the record. Fear is stalking the hallways of the Journal, which will soon vacate its Lower Manhattan office for new digs at News Corp headquarters in Midtown.

Another writer I attempted to reach was Lucette Lagnado, who, since 1996, has covered a crucial beat for the Journal: hospitals, the poor, the uninsured. One of her most vivid and outstanding pieces, which clearly took months of work and which generated Congressional action, appeared in 2007 under this headline: Prescription Abuse Seen in U.S. Nursing Homes; Powerful Antipsychotics Used to Subdue Elderly; Huge Medicaid Expense. I was curious about Lagnado’s current situation at the paper: on February 20 she wrote a meager article about falling prices for luxury real estate in the Hamptons. And on April 4 she produced a leder on the parental duties of the elderly during the economic crisis–one that was noticeably less ambitious in scope than her usual investigative fare. But Lagnado declined to talk to me: “I shall not be available for your story,” she wrote in an e-mail. Over the next year or two, Lagnado’s fate–and those of several dozen old-school, independent-minded reporters like her–will reveal much about Murdoch’s Journal. Says Prager, “A tremendous number of reporters there are frustrated now.”

That frustration could mount in the coming months. On March 19 Thomson sent the staff a memo regarding the integration of the Journal with Dow Jones Newswires, which competes with Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters in the lucrative financial news market. In the past, reporters were encouraged to produce material for the Newswires, but now it is mandatory. As Thomson wrote, “Even a headstart of a few seconds is priceless for a commodities trader or a bond dealer…. henceforth all Journal reporters will be judged, in significant part, by whether they break news for the Newswires.” With its emphasis on speed over analysis, and its insistence that every reporter fall into line, Thomson’s memo might well be seen, in the years to come, as one more nail in the coffin of long-form writing at the Journal.

One striking consequence of the meltdown of the US newspaper industry has been the semi-rehabilitation of Rupert Murdoch. A boogeyman who was vilified for attempting to purchase Dow Jones is being extolled for his commitment to ink, paper, printing presses and a well-staffed newsroom. Talking to people about Murdoch’s Journal, one hears countless variations on this theme: “Well, at least Rupert’s investing in it…” The Media Baron Who Loves Print was the headline of a recent New York Times article about the Australian press lord. Journal spokesman Robert Christie puts it this way: “He’s largely viewed, whether you like him or not, as someone who has invested in and is saving the paper.”

Perhaps so. But admirers of the Journal should not overlook what has been lost or ignore Murdoch’s heavy hand. In early 2008 he forced out the paper’s well-regarded editor, Marcus Brauchli, in a way that circumvented a “special committee” established as a condition of the sale of Dow Jones to News Corp. Part of the committee’s mandate was to preserve the Journal‘s editorial independence, for which it was given “rights of approval” on the hiring and firing of the managing editor. But Murdoch ignored the committee (whose members received annual salaries of $100,000) and, in the words of Slate press critic Jack Shafer, reduced its members to “a set of high-paid flunkies.”

Brauchli, now executive editor of the Washington Post, was replaced by Thomson, the US managing editor of the Financial Times before he took over the Times of London. In public Thomson is quick to praise his boss: “Rupert is passionate about newspapers; he’s passionate about news,” he told a group of journalism students in 2008. “What we are experiencing at the Wall Street Journal is the articulation of that passion.”

First-rate editors not only praise their publishers in public but challenge them behind closed doors. Is Thomson strong and confident enough to challenge Murdoch? On that score, Journal watchers are not optimistic. “I don’t think there is any possibility that Thomson will stand up to Murdoch on any major issue,” says former Journal executive editor Fred Taylor. “That’s why he’s in that job.” Time will tell if Thomson, like his predecessors Taylor, Norman Pearlstine and Paul Steiger, is interested in stories with “moral force,” or if he is merely Murdoch’s caretaker and custodian.

Some staffers were jolted by Thomson’s announcement, in November, that the paper’s new deputy editor in chief would be Gerard Baker, a veteran of the BBC, the Financial Times and the Times of London, where he served, most recently, as US editor and (conservative) columnist. Writing in the Times of London on November 7, Baker lamented, “An Obama administration and a solidly Democratic Congress represent the most significant and unwelcome leftward tilt in American politics in at least a generation.” Some Journal staff have circulated, with amusement and dismay, a YouTube clip originating from Fox News, in which Baker offers a puerile commentary on the candidacy of Barack Obama. Says one staffer with a sigh: “It seems doubtful they conducted an exhaustive nationwide search to find the best qualified candidate for the number-two job in the Journal‘s newsroom. What does it tell you that someone like Baker was appointed?”

Overt bias in the Journal‘s news columns has been rare. But a handful of recent ledes and headlines raise eyebrows. Consider the opening sentence of the paper’s Page 1 story on January 29, concerning the stimulus package: “The House passed an $819 billion tax-and-spending bill Wednesday…” Or this Page 1 headline from February 26: $318 Billion Tax Hit Proposed. (The New York Times, in contrast, chose the headline Obama to Call for Higher Tax on Top Earners.) If Paul Steiger or Marcus Brauchli were still at the helm of the Journal, no one would fret about bias in the news columns. However, a fundamental question remains about the new regime: are Murdoch, Thomson and Baker truly committed to the old model of unbiased news reporting, or might they be tempted to embrace a more politicized, pugnacious and populist version of the news?

“I’m a little puzzled by the Journal‘s evolving identity,” Times executive editor Bill Keller told me in an e-mail. “Some days the front page is mostly general-interest news, like a cross between the Times and USA Today. Then the next day you get a front like today [March 12], when the lead story (“EBay Retreats in Web Retailing”) is clearly aimed at core business readers. Some days the tone is FT (a top-of-the-page curtain raiser on the G-20 summit); some days it is tabloid populist (lashing the million-dollar-bonus recipients at Merrill). If the paper has made up its mind what it wants to be, it’s not clear to me. Maybe they hope we’ll all keep reading just to see how they resolve their identity crisis.”

Journal staffers, too, are uncertain about the paper’s overall direction. “Because of the election and the financial crisis, and the daily crush of big, breaking news, the last six months were not typical,” says one reporter. “The test will come when all that settles down, when we have a less tumultuous news cycle. At that point we’ll see how things shake out.” A former reporter, sounding like Eugene Roberts circa 2008, is more bitingly cynical: “This country will soon have two USA Todays and one New York Times.” (Some of the bloated color graphics that have recently appeared in the Journal do call to mind USA Today or the New York Post.) But the prevailing sentiment among Journal staff is relief that, at a time when thousands of newspaper jobs have been liquidated, they are still employed. Says one Journal reporter: “Is it better to be on a sinking ship, or one that’s been captured by pirates? While other newspapers are going down, for now we’re still afloat.”

Tom Albert PhotoGeorge Plimpton in Detroit, September 2003

In the summer of 1963, while most of his companions were toiling in sundry Manhattan offices, George Plimpton spent many a weekday alone in Central Park tossing a football. “Without someone to throw to,” he later remembered, “it was a melancholy practice–to throw a ball in a park meadow and then walk to it, and throw it again–and I did it in a sort of dull, bored way.” Plimpton hoped that his nonchalant bearing would convince the elderly men flying kites that he was merely awaiting the arrival of friends caught in a traffic jam. If the heat in the park was too intense, he would practice in his apartment–“a sort of studio, long enough to allow a throw into an armchair from twenty or twenty-five feet away.”

Plimpton was in the grip of a quixotic notion: to become the “last-string quarterback” of the Detroit Lions. When he arrived at the Lions’ training facility later that summer, he was greeted by the equipment manager, Friday Macklem, who declared, “I hear you’re a writer turned footballer. You’re going to play for us–making some sort of big comeback.” “That’s right,” Plimpton replied in his patrician accent. Macklem shook his head: “Well, I’ve been with Detroit for twenty-seven years, dishing out uniforms all those years, and I know if I’d ever been tempted into one, I wouldn’t be around to tell of it, for sure.” Not only did Plimpton survive his foray into professional football, but he also produced a fine book about it, Paper Lion, which enhanced his personal wealth and literary clout. The book sold extremely well, and Tom Wolfe included excerpts from it in his famous anthology The New Journalism, published in 1973.

As a “participatory journalist,” Plimpton endeavored, in a wry, self-deprecating manner, to “play out the fantasies, the daydreams that so many people have.” And so he had his nose bloodied by the boxer Archie Moore at Stillman’s Gym; he was vanquished by Arnold Palmer on the golf course; he floated through the air on the trapeze for the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus; he performed with the New York Philharmonic; he tried stand-up comedy in Las Vegas; he was a Bedouin extra in Lawrence of Arabia; he was shot by John Wayne in Rio Lobo; he pitched to nine players, including Willie Mays, during an unofficial postseason all-star game at Yankee Stadium. From this last endeavor came a slim book, Out of My League, which contained a blurb from Plimpton’s hero, Ernest Hemingway, who praised it as “beautifully observed and incredibly conceived.”

Reality sometimes intruded into Plimpton’s daydreams. In 1968, when Sirhan Sirhan shot Robert Kennedy in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, Plimpton helped to wrestle the pistol from the assassin’s hand. In George, Being George, Nelson Aldrich Jr.’s affectionate and absorbing oral history, we learn that Plimpton never wrote about Kennedy’s slaying, but that many years later, over cocktails with young staff members of The Paris Review, the journal he had led since 1953, he burst into tears at the memory of it.

But distress and trauma were fleeting occurrences in the Plimptonian realm. Throughout five decades, the writer and editor, to a breathtaking degree, enacted his daydreams and fantasies and fashioned them into a glittering persona. He was “George Plimpton”–editor, host, naturalist, toastmaster, celebrity escort, fireworks specialist, athlete, gossip and playboy. (Esquire listed him as one of the most attractive men in America.) As Nathan Zuckerman declared in Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost: “When people say to themselves ‘I want to be happy,’ they could as well be saying ‘I want to be George Plimpton’: one achieves, one is productive, and there’s pleasure and ease in all of it.” The friends, colleagues and associates of “George Plimpton” monitored it all with varying degrees of astonishment, amusement and distress. “I have a hard time having fun, period, and he was the paragon of fun,” Richard Price says in George, Being George. “George knew so many more people than I did,” Norman Mailer recalled, “he was having so much more fun in New York than I was having. I felt that whatever enjoyment I was having, I had earned; and there is nothing that excites envy like the feeling that you received no more than you earned, while there was George, who had received so much more than he had earned.”

Plimpton was born in Manhattan in 1927 and raised in a Fifth Avenue duplex with views of the East River and the Central Park Reservoir. His lineage was equally commanding. His great-grandfather Adelbert Ames was the youngest general in the Civil War and subsequently became a Reconstruction governor of Mississippi. His grandfather George Arthur Plimpton earned a fortune as a textbook publisher and served on the boards of the New York Philharmonic, Exeter and Barnard. His father, Francis T.P. Plimpton, was a partner at the white-shoe law firm Debevoise & Plimpton and a man whose favorite lecture at the family dinner table concerned “the beauty of the mortgage indenture.”

Family summers were spent near Walt Whitman’s birthplace in leafy West Hills, a tight WASP community of lawyers, brokers, bankers and architects on Long Island. The years passed in a whirl of touch football, tennis, swimming, bicycling and Ping-Pong. “My parents lived in the same small tribal community as the Plimptons,” George’s cousin Joan Ames told Aldrich. “I remember this little telephone table in my parents’ bedroom that held the Social Register; it was the only phone book we ever used.” George was not a reclusive child. “Our parents entertained there a lot,” his younger brother Oakes recalled. “George came by his social appetites honestly–our parents were very social people–but I guess he outdid them and then some.”

Francis T.P. Plimpton placed a high premium on a certain kind of education, and George began his schooling at St. Bernard’s, next door to the family’s apartment building. His classmates included Charles Morgan, J.P. Morgan’s grandson, and Arthur Sulzberger, scion of the New York Times. Aldrich recounts a story about a weekend trip Plimpton made with Sulzberger to the country, in a chauffeured limousine that got a flat tire:

What followed was not the worst of George’s lifetime of mortifications, but he vividly recalled his squirming embarrassment in the backseat as the chauffeur got out of the car and set about changing the tire. He remembered how the tails of the man’s black uniform jacket flapped crazily in the wind of the passing traffic and how the sweat stood out on his face as he worked the jack up and down, up and down, while the rear of the car, with the little boys safe in their soft gray seats, went up, up, up.

Family ties to Exeter–his father chaired the board of trustees–facilitated George’s arrival there in 1940, and he soon distinguished himself with his manners and sophistication, and his skill in athletics. He did not excel in the classroom, perhaps because, as a friend offers, “his mind was not set up for strict schedules.” For disregarding curfew, Plimpton was placed on disciplinary probation; and for aiming a Revolutionary musket at the football coach, he was expelled.

He made it to Harvard nevertheless–“It was a little easier to get into Harvard in those days,” Oakes Plimpton says–and arrived in 1944. He joined the Lampoon, immersed himself in the Porcellian Club and got acquainted with Archibald MacLeish, I.A. Richards and F.O. Matthiessen, whose company deepened his interest in literature and the arts. He began to ponder a career in publishing. When he decided to pursue graduate study in English in Britain, his father was not excluded from the application process. “May I again say,” George wrote in a letter to his parents, “that I am more particularly interested in Cambridge at the moment, and the epistolary offensive should be directed towards that University.” As usual, things went his way, and in the fall of 1950 Mr. and Mrs. Plimpton received a letter from their son about the new heights he had scaled abroad: “There is no mountain climbing here, East Anglia being notoriously flat, but there is a wonderful sport called roof-climbing.”

Founded in 1953, The Paris Review was the brainchild of two young expatriates, Harold (“Doc”) Humes and Peter Matthiessen, who met in Paris in the winter of 1951-52. Humes was a mentally unbalanced former Navy cook who fled the United States in 1948 because, as he once declared, “the alternative to leaving was suicide or madness.” He wandered through the city’s summer heat dressed in a wool suit and homburg and sporting a silver-handled cane. Matthiessen was a handsome, gifted and supremely confident graduate of Yale (class of 1950). Born eight weeks after Plimpton, he also enjoyed a velvet upbringing. The son of a prominent architect, he was raised in Manhattan and Stamford, Connecticut–indeed, his parents owned an apartment in the same building where Plimpton grew up, 1165 Fifth Avenue–and he was in Plimpton’s class at St. Bernard’s. In 1952 he invited Plimpton, who was still in England, to come to Paris and assume the editorship of a new literary journal, which George agreed to do.

From the start, the founders of The Paris Review endeavored to navigate a course between The Kenyon Review, which favored a form of academically inflected criticism that, as William Styron proclaimed in the inaugural issue of The Paris Review, smothered literature “under the weight of learned chatter,” and Partisan Review, whose editors had been tested by the literary polemics and ideological fisticuffs of the 1930s. Instead of learned criticism, or scrappy essays in the vein of Philip Rahv, the fledgling Paris Review decided to publish what Styron called “creative work”–fiction, poetry, art. And instead of conversing about literature in the lofty tone of the critic, the editors, in a marvelous stroke of insight, decided that they would speak directly to the finest writers, in tightly edited Q&A interviews, where the muse could dance on the page:

INTERVIEWER: Are there devices one can use in improving one’s technique?
 CAPOTE: Work is the only device I know of. Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.

There is no better guide to the art of writing than the stray volumes of Paris Review interviews, whose sprightly pages constitute a voluble history of twentieth-century English-language literature.

Plimpton & Co. avoided wading into the muck of politics. Robert Silvers, who met Plimpton in Paris in 1954 and would soon become a Paris Review editor, told Aldrich he was struck by a tone-setting essay of John Train’s in the first issue: “He pointedly seemed to avoid such matters as the bitter controversy between Sartre and Camus that was dividing Paris intellectuals at the time.” The Paris Review was the antithesis of another Paris-based journal, Merlin, whose expat editors included Alexander Trocchi and Richard Seaver, and which promised to “hit at all clots of rigid categories in criticism and life.” Seaver notes: “Trocchi used to try and get George more interested in the political concerns of Europe and our country, but George could not get existentially involved in that. He was a terribly positive person, even if postwar Paris wasn’t.” Over the years, the decidedly literary bent of The Paris Review would leave some admirers disenchanted. “How is it,” John Leonard wrote in 1981, “that The Paris Review–unlike, say, Partisan Review, which has been around considerably longer–seems so tangential to the politics of its portion of the 20th century…?”

Having chosen a purely literary path, how well did the editors acquit themselves? By and large, they leaned toward the conventional and the canonical. They had no desire to brush up against the avant-garde or the law, as Margaret Anderson did by serializing Ulysses in Little Review before its book publication in 1922, a decision that incurred the wrath of the US Post Office–which found some parts of the work obscene and refused to distribute copies of the magazine–and altered the course of fiction. We remember The Dial because it published T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, early drafts of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, the scintillating poems and prose of Marianne Moore and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. The editors of The Paris Review made no discoveries of that caliber: for the most part they preferred to reinforce reputations rather than scout young talent. Still, no one can sneer at their choices in the ’50s and early ’60s: stories by Philip Roth later included in Goodbye, Columbus; the first English translations of Italo Calvino; early work by Nadine Gordimer, Richard Yates and Stanley Elkin. If The Paris Review was not always wildly adventurous–Gerald Howard has persuasively argued that Ted Solotaroff’s New American Review surpassed The Paris Review, and every other literary journal, between 1967 and 1977–it was consistently impressive.

Plimpton moved back to Manhattan in 1955, followed by others in the Paris Review circle. They returned “not in the melancholy mood of Malcolm Cowley’s exiles of the Twenties, who were forced home during the early currents of the crash,” Gay Talese noted in a famous article in Esquire in 1956, “but rather with the attitude that the party would now shift to the other side of the Atlantic.” Plimpton’s home at 541 East Seventy-second Street became the epicenter of “the Paris Review crowd.” George, Being George contains a famous photograph of a party that Plimpton hosted in 1963: the male guests, neatly outfitted in suits and ties, included Styron, Gore Vidal, Jonathan Miller, Truman Capote, Arthur Penn, Mario Puzo and a stiff-looking Ralph Ellison, the only nonwhite face in the room. In the foreground is Plimpton, dashingly at ease, clutching a cocktail. Gazing at this photo, you begin to get a sense of why James Baldwin, who spent eight days in a Paris jail in 1949 after being falsely accused of stealing a hotel bedsheet, was moved to dismiss the Paris Review crowd as a circle of wealthy dilettantes. Still, at least guests didn’t have to be wealthy or famous to be admitted to Plimpton’s parties. Geoffrey Gates explains that, following his departure from the Marine Corps in the late 1950s and his subsequent expulsion from his mother’s house, he moved in with a friend of Plimpton’s, who recounted the revelry to Gates: “‘What we’ve got here are a lot of young editors and writers, and a lot of girls, and all the liquor you could drink.’ I said, ‘I’m very interested.'”

For Jules Feiffer, those gatherings marked the eclipse of McCarthyism and nascent stirrings of a new generation: “George’s literary world,” Feiffer says in George, Being George, “was part of a general cultural revolt–against conformity, against sexual constraint.” Anne Roiphe’s memories tilt toward the sardonic: “Most of the time everybody was too drunk to be brilliant,” she says. “It was more about one big bull bumping up against another big bull.” By the early 1960s, Plimpton’s salon–along with his expanding portfolio of journalism and his social connections to the Kennedys–helped to cement his celebrity status. Guests on their way home from 541 East Seventy-second would be greeted by taxi drivers inquiring, “Is that George Plimpton’s building?”

Plimpton’s annexation of Manhattan’s social universe set him apart from some of the other early members of The Paris Review circle–including Peter Matthiessen, who was beginning to adopt a more obstreperous and combative stance toward the establishment. “I remember being present many years ago, in the 50’s, when by chance [Matthiessen] discovered his name was still in the Social Register,” William Styron told The New York Times Magazine in 1990. “I remember his rage at finding it there, and his determination to get it out.” By the late 1950s, Matthiessen, in full flight from his gold-plated roots, had embarked on a remarkable career that would include literary fiction, nature writing, environmental activism and left-wing pamphleteering. Fifty years on, he has more than thirty books to his name, including The Snow Leopard, an account of his spiritual pilgrimage to the Crystal Mountain in northwestern Nepal; Sal Si Puedes, a chronicle of Cesar Chavez’s advocacy on behalf of migrant farmworkers; Oomingmak, a record of his trip to Nunivak Island in the Bering Sea in search of rare musk ox calves; Men’s Lives, an elegiac tribute to the beleaguered baymen of eastern Long Island; and In The Spirit of Crazy Horse, a 600-page defense of Leonard Peltier, which sparked an acrimonious seven-year legal battle from which Matthiessen and his publisher, Viking, emerged victorious. Matthiessen was recently awarded the National Book Award in fiction for his long-gestating novel Shadow Country.

In the 1960s, Matthiessen made a dramatic confession to his colleagues at The Paris Review: he had originally been sent to Paris by the CIA in 1950 and had used the fledgling journal as cover for his intelligence gathering. As Frances Stonor Saunders demonstrated in her deeply researched, muckraking book The Cultural Cold War (2000), the CIA, in a bold attempt to wean European and Third World intellectuals away from left-wing, anti-American ideology, provided funding for a considerable number of conferences, periodicals, exhibitions and concerts. It was a time when writers and intellectuals were not tenured professors but, in many cases, gladiators in the cold war. Matthiessen’s contribution to that effort began at Yale, when he was recruited by professor Norman Holmes Pearson, a friend of W.H. Auden and Wallace Stevens and a veteran of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Matthiessen viewed it as the beginning of a great adventure: a CIA post would transport him to Paris, provide him with a regular paycheck and afford him the necessary leisure to write novels. It was a decision devoid of angst: he was all-American and apolitical, and the young CIA exuded romance; it had yet to fully set up shop in the cold war slaughterhouses of Iran, Guatemala and Chile. Today, few if any of Matthiessen’s peers view the choice he made with rancor. “It was not an opprobrious thing,” says Russ Hemenway in George, Being George. “Those of us who had been in World War Two realized that we had no intelligence service at all, just the OSS. So we were delighted with this thing they called the Central Intelligence Agency.”

Matthiessen’s affiliation with the agency has been public for many years. He was first unveiled as a CIA agent by the New York Times, which in 1977 published a formidable series about the agency’s influence in the cultural sphere. (It remains unclear who gave Matthiessen’s name to the Times.) His case was not widely discussed until 2006, when Doc Humes’s daughter, Immy Humes, released a documentary about her father that highlighted the tensions that sprang up within The Paris Review around the question of Matthiessen’s CIA past. Her film, Doc, aroused the interest of the Times. “I used The Paris Review as a cover, there’s no question of that,” Matthiessen told Times reporter Rachel Donadio in February 2008, “but the CIA had nothing to do with Paris Review.”

But Matthiessen was thrown off balance by a revelation from Aldrich, which the latter shared with Donadio: a wealthy, shadowy cold war operative named Julius “Junkie” Fleischmann had provided $1,000 to The Paris Review in the journal’s earliest days. (In a recent interview, Aldrich said this information came from a letter in the possession of Plimpton’s widow.) Fleischmann was a major player in the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom, which helped to launch and sustain the London-based intellectual journal Encounter in 1953. In The Cultural Cold War, Stonor Saunders refers to him as “the CIA’s most significant single front-man.” These days, in the wake of Stonor Saunders’s account, Matthiessen is not especially eager to be caught in Fleischmann’s historical company, and in George, Being George he speculates that the $1,000 may have come from another Fleischmann–Raoul, the publisher of The New Yorker, who died in 1969.

Documents in the Paris Review archive, which are housed at the Morgan Library, reveal that the source of the $1,000 was indeed Julius and that Matthiessen solicited the contribution. The Morgan Library possesses a handwritten letter, on Paris Review stationery, from Matthiessen to Julius Fleischmann, who had been a friend of Matthiessen’s parents. In the letter, which is undated but probably from 1952, Matthiessen wrote: “Here at last is a prospectus of the fine literary review I mentioned to you…it will be the best new literary quarterly since the TRANSITION of the Hemingway-Pound-Gertrude Stein era.” Apparently, money from Fleischmann soon materialized. For decades Matthiessen has assiduously maintained that the CIA did not found or influence the fledgling Paris Review, but in George, Being George he yields some ground and admits that the $1,000 investment “muddies the picture a bit.”

How significant, really, was Fleischmann’s contribution? In 1953, $1,000 was not an enormous amount of money, but neither was it an insignificant sum for a new, struggling literary magazine. Assuming Fleischmann’s commitment was limited to $1,000, The Paris Review would likely have survived without it. It should be emphasized that the CIA and its front organizations never made a full-scale commitment to The Paris Review, as they did to Encounter. (Indeed, it was funding from the CIA and the British government that transformed Encounter into one of the world’s most vibrant intellectual journals in the 1950s and ’60s.) The CIA also supported other small publications, including The Kenyon Review, Partisan Review, The Sewanee Review and several foreign journals like Transition. The Paris Review never benefited from that largesse, and Plimpton’s life was more stressful as a result: a survey of his voluminous correspondence at the Morgan Library reveals that he devoted a significant number of his waking hours, over many years, to the arduous task of fundraising. Cash was never plentiful: Larry Bensky recalls that in 1964-66, the years he staffed the Paris office of The Paris Review, the journal was operating on a shoestring.

In assessing the history of the journal, how consequential was its early liaison with the CIA? In light of the paucity of scholarly material, the person most qualified to make that assessment is Peter Matthiessen. If he believes the waters have been “muddied” by recent revelations, then he should endeavor to cleanse them. But over the years, and to this day, Matthiessen, who says he quit the CIA in disgust in 1953, has been tight-lipped. On those rare occasions when he has discussed this matter on the record–Aldrich’s book being one of those occasions–his normally pellucid language becomes opaque. Coming from him, such reticence is disheartening. Since the late 1950s, Matthiessen has been an indefatigable activist and truth-teller. It’s difficult to think of another major American writer who has devoted himself to such a wide range of causes, movements and struggles, many of which involve pressing ecological and environmental matters. The result is a body of work, much of which appeared in William Shawn’s New Yorker, defined by political commitment, literary distinction, lived experience and action.

Matthiessen, who is 81, has yet to undertake a memoir, but the moment for him to clarify the origins of The Paris Review has arrived, even if the questions at stake are primarily of interest to cold war historians, aficionados of little magazines and devotees of Frances Stonor Saunders, and even if the subject matter arouses in him a degree of personal discomfort. Such a reckoning may well enlarge his reputation rather than diminish it. The questions he should answer include: Why, in George Being George, did he float the name of Raoul Fleischmann when Aldrich had already informed him that Julius Fleischmann was the actual Paris Review donor? (It’s worth noting that Raoul’s name is absent from Stonor Saunders’s exhaustive and uncompromising account, while the book has many references to Julius.) Was Julius acting on his own behalf when he contributed that $1,000, or was he a conduit of funds from the US government? Did any of the other early donors, of whom there were at least eighteen, have direct (or indirect) ties to the CIA or its front organizations? As for Matthiessen, what did his CIA masters hope to achieve by allowing him to use the avowedly apolitical Paris Review as his “cover”? Were these the same men who backed Encounter, in which Julius Fleischmann was also a principal stockholder and which, like The Paris Review, was created in 1953? What were Matthiessen’s duties as a CIA agent in Paris in the early days of the cold war, and what were the precise circumstances of his departure from the agency?

Matthiessen’s silence and reticence about such matters would end up angering some of his Paris Review colleagues. Not until the 1960s did he inform them of the true origins of the journal: Plimpton got the news in 1963 and Doc Humes in 1967. (Regarding the delay in telling Doc, Matthiessen maintains that he didn’t think Doc could handle the information.) During the research for her film, Immy Humes unearthed a letter from Doc to Plimpton written shortly after Doc had received Matthiessen’s revelation about the CIA. As Immy Humes says in George, Being George:

The letter from Doc was extraordinarily lucid for somebody who had literally lost his mind and was listening to implanted broadcasts from his furniture. He says he’s going to resign from The Paris Review unless Peter goes public with his story–he’s to be congratulated on coming out on all this, but he needs to write it in public in The Saturday Evening Post or, God help us, in The Paris Review. Peter never did.

Breaking the news to his old classmate Plimpton was perhaps more difficult. “I assured him,” Matthiessen told Aldrich, “that I’d kept my two Paris activities strictly separate and that the Review had never been contaminated by the CIA. Even so, he was shocked and very angry, understandably so. Who, after all, wants to hear that the ‘love of his life,’ as he himself would call it, had been conceived as a cover for another man’s secret activities?”

Aldrich affirms in his editor’s note that he modeled George, Being George on Edie, the classic oral biography of Edie Sedgwick that Jean Stein (mother of The Nation‘s editor and publisher) and George Plimpton published in 1982. Edie is primarily Stein’s book; Plimpton was brought in to edit and organize Stein’s colossal stack of transcripts. Aldrich has chosen a steep mountain to scale. While George, Being George resembles Edie in form–pithy interview fragments, artfully arranged and configured, cascade down the page–the setting, tone and mood diverge considerably. Edie is about a privileged young woman’s descent into the Warholian abyss, where bohemian eccentricity collided with the berserk. What has Aldrich discovered? That Plimpton had affairs with a slew of young women and attended orgies in Manhattan in the 1970s.

For the most part, there’s no comparison between Plimpton’s genteel milieu and the pandemonium of both the Factory and the psychiatric institutions that were a second home to Edie. And while George, Being George contains a stirring assemblage of voices (including Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Gay Talese and Harold Bloom), Aldrich’s cast pales in comparison with Stein’s dramatis personae: Capote, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Jasper Johns and Warhol, to name a few. From these voices Stein and Plimpton sculpted passages that rise from the page and lodge in the mind. Ondine: “Those were the days I lived in Central Park. I’d wake up by the lakes and swim in them.” Gerard Malanga: “Andy [Warhol] would also probably deny being high on LSD, yet I found him at six in the morning [on Fire Island] rummaging through the garbage cans.” Henry Geldzahler: “When [Edie] was being paid less attention to, she didn’t know who she was. That possibility of destruction was built into the weakness of her personality. We have to get used to the reality that we’re alone. If you can’t get used to it, then you go mad. And she went kind of mad.” Nothing in Aldrich’s book is quite so fine as these passages. But what ultimately distinguishes Edie from George, Being George is the stagecraft employed by Stein and Plimpton, the drama they created through the scrupulous arrangement of voices into a rich, structurally coherent montage; Aldrich’s book is a less dynamic collection of skillfully orchestrated monologues. Still, aficionados of Plimpton, The Paris Review, the “quality lit set” and Manhattan’s upper crust will savor Aldrich’s book like a dry vodka martini.

Aldrich tells us that he wrestled with the chronology of Plimpton’s life. It was more or less linear until George returned to Manhattan in 1955, at which point his days began to whirl into a carousel of assorted routines in which “chronology becomes almost irrelevant”:

There was the Review to edit and the staff to hang out with; games to play at the Racquet Club; books and articles to write for anyone who would pay for them; New York ceremonies to MC; girls to make love with; and always, from every direction, the endlessly seductive pull of friendship to respond to. The only big changes in his life that followed chronology were his marriages–which, notoriously, hardly changed anything in his life.

Some of the most illuminating sections of George, Being George concern the ongoing tension in Plimpton’s life between his journalistic output, his stewardship of The Paris Review and his myriad social and financial obligations. Plimpton’s literary career began auspiciously enough. In 1956 he launched a fruitful collaboration with Sports Illustrated; his first piece was about the “many-sided character” of Harold Vanderbilt and his success in the America’s Cup. It was in the pages of SI that Plimpton launched his forays into professional baseball and football, which in turn led to Out of My League and Paper Lion. The former is sprightly but somewhat weightless; the latter, by contrast, demonstrated what Plimpton, at his most resolute, could accomplish at the typewriter. Paper Lion has vivid details, exuberant humor, a powerful narrative arc and a polished, sophisticated diction, all of which suggested a young craftsman pushing himself to the limit. His early books on sports were wildly popular: in 1970 Time reported combined sales of nearly 2 million copies.

But success on that scale was difficult to repeat in the 1970s and ’80s. There were some fine books to come–Shadow Box: An Amateur in the Ring, which contains an uproarious account of his bout with Archie Moore, appeared in 1977–but Plimpton eventually found himself marginalized at Sports Illustrated, as the magazine became less accommodating to his idiosyncratic brand of personalized reporting. “His interests had changed, too,” says former SI editor Myra Gelband in George, Being George. “He wasn’t gonna go suit up and play football for us, and we weren’t gonna run those kinds of stories.”

His financial position (strained by marriage, children, club memberships, weekend homes and the barely solvent Paris Review) was not improving, and by the ’80s much of Plimpton’s income was derived from television commercials (for Carlsberg beer, Saab and Dry Dock Savings Bank, among others) and speechmaking, an endeavor in which he saw his fee sink from $20,000 per appearance at his apex in the ’70s to less than $5,000 by the ’90s. And the literary projects he undertook to pay the bills didn’t always suit his talents: D.V., his 1984 collaboration with Diana Vreeland, borders on hackwork. In a nation more enamored of stars than scribes, Plimpton the writer and editor was eventually transformed, in the public mind, into Plimpton the celebrity. Says Jonathan Dee, who worked at The Paris Review in the late ’80s:

The irony is that his whole “participatory” method was devised as a way to get a better picture of the subject–it wasn’t supposed to be about George. But over time, and more or less against his will, his celebrity became such that it overshadowed whatever else he might have wanted you to get out of the story. His persona was his livelihood, and it was also a kind of trap for him. But then that happens to a lot of successful public figures. If you want to say he was complicit in it, I suppose it was only by reason of the extraordinarily hard time he had saying no.

As lucrative writing opportunities began to recede, Plimpton took refuge in “the love of his life.” According to Marion Capron, who worked at The Paris Review in the 1950s, the journal became a crutch for Plimpton: “He didn’t want nine to five. He didn’t want a regular life, but he needed a calling card; he needed a peg to hang himself on.” Matthiessen told Aldrich, with a sliver of derision, “He needed the magazine. The Paris Review was the armature for everything he did.” A more equitable interpretation is offered by Plimpton’s friend and editor Terry McDonell: “Deep in his heart the Review was the place he felt most comfortable, his spiritual hideout.”

Plimpton was on a ship in the Galápagos with Matthiessen and Jean Kennedy Smith in 2003 when a call came from New York: a publishing house had offered to pay $750,000 for Plimpton’s memoirs. His friends were ecstatic: “He could have written a wonderful book on the manners and morals of his time and place and class,” says Gerald Clarke. “George knew his world as Evelyn Waugh knew his.” But Plimpton was chilled by the idea, telling his wife Sarah, “I don’t want to do this. I’ve already written the stories of my life, what more is there to say? It’s like putting the nails in the coffin.” For Plimpton, it seemed that the adrenaline that enabled him to write Paper Lion and Shadow Box had dissipated with the years. At a private gathering in 1992, after the funeral of Doc Humes, Maggie Paley heard him utter, “I could have been a contender.” Paley says: “Clearly to me he was saying ‘If I hadn’t done The Paris Review, I could have been a major writer.'” Norman Mailer had a different view: with his customary frankness, he told Aldrich that the gods denied Plimpton “a huge literary talent.”

But maybe the gods weren’t to blame. A subtheme winding its way through George, Being George is that underneath Plimpton’s deeply amiable exterior was a person who sometimes came across as a Man Without Qualities. Says Oliver Broudy, a former colleague at The Paris Review: “I don’t know that he knew who he was.” For Plimpton to write a great book, says the literary agent Lynn Nesbit,

He would have needed to tell it; he needed an audience. To write, to do great writing, you have to be alone, to have privacy, a private life. He was the most thoroughly social creature I’ve ever known. I think George experienced private life as a terrible deprivation; I think he would have preferred not to have one.

Or perhaps his writerly inclinations at that point were better suited to a more modest undertaking, a book on the order of Lost Property: Memoirs & Confessions of a Bad Boy (1991), Ben Sonnenberg’s graceful account of his life as a hedonist and literary editor, or a collection of private jottings akin to his friend Kenneth Tynan’s dark and enthralling Diaries. In 1993 Plimpton produced “Death in the Family,” a learned essay about ornithology, for The New York Review of Books. Writing with melancholy and rage about the decimation of bird populations, he effortlessly chronicled the travails of the ivory-billed woodpecker, the whooping crane, the Micronesian kingfisher and Kirtland’s warbler. Birds were a subject about which he felt strongly, and on which he might have written, if he so desired, a fine and valuable book.

The accumulated residue of years of high living–he had a fondness for alcohol, and he subsisted on a diet that his doctor described as “quite poor”–began to take a heavy toll on Plimpton in the ’90s. “He went to the doctor a lot,” his assistant says in George, Being George. “He seemed preoccupied with checkups.” In 2003, while drinking at the bar of the Brook Club, Plimpton’s blood pressure fell, and he collapsed on the floor. The paramedics recognized him and, while slapping his face, yelled, “Hey, George! Wake up!”–at which point the maitre d’ turned to them and declared, “At the Brook Club, sir, we refer to him as Mr. Plimpton.”

He had been ruminating about death for a long time. In 1977 The New York Review of Books published “The Last Laugh,” in which Plimpton surveyed his writer friends about how they wished to die. Nowhere in Plimpton’s oeuvre are the high-spirited and melancholy elements of his personality held in more perfect equipoise. “The Last Laugh” was inspired by a conversation he had with Norman Mailer in Kinshasa in 1974, when both men were covering the Muhammad Ali-George Foreman heavyweight title fight. Mailer affirmed that he would be content if a biographical note in the back of a high school anthology read: “Norman Mailer had been killed by an African lion near the banks of the Zaire in his fifty-first year.” (Mailer’s second choice: “Taken by a whale off Cape Cod in his fifty-first year.”) Gore Vidal declared: “When I go, everyone goes with me. You are all figments of my waking dreams.” And Plimpton’s preference? “I usually saw myself ‘shuffling off’…in Yankee Stadium…sometimes as a batter beaned by a villainous man with a beard, occasionally as an outfielder running into the monuments that once stood in deep center field…a slight crumpled figure against the grass.”

It didn’t exactly turn out that way, but Plimpton’s good fortune sustained him to the end. On his last day, September 25, 2003, he taped a spot for Conan O’Brien, met with a fundraiser from Harvard, rehearsed for a play and embarked on his customary nocturnal rounds. Later that evening, after he had turned in, he shuffled off painlessly. “He died in his sleep from a catecholamine surge, resulting in sudden cardiac arrest,” Dr. Denton Cox told Nelson Aldrich Jr. “For George it was an ideal way to go.”

V.S. Naipaul Archive, U of TulsaV.S. Naipaul in Oklahoma

In 1998, a young English journalist named Patrick French arrived in India on assignment for The New Yorker. One day in Delhi, a well-connected friend offered to drive French to a press conference, and he found himself in a car with V.S. Naipaul and his wife. Naipaul “was wearing many layers of clothing and a tweed jacket, despite the heat,” French recalls. “He held a trilby hat carefully in his lap. A roll-neck sweater merged with his beard, completing the impression that he was fully covered.” Mrs. Naipaul inquired about the New Yorker article, and French replied that he was having some difficulty with the magazine’s fact-checkers. “Don’t let The New Yorker worry you,” Naipaul sniffed. “The New Yorker knows nothing about writing. Nothing. Writing an article there is like posting a letter in a Venezuelan postbox; nobody will read it.”

Three years later, French was invited to undertake a project as grueling as writing scores of New Yorker articles: an authorized biography of V.S. Naipaul. (French has not elaborated on the circumstances that led to the invitation.) At first, French hesitated; the scope and complexity of the project seemed daunting. Naipaul, after all, has written twenty-nine books, which include novels, linked stories, travel writing (three books on India among them), history, literary criticism, reportage and genre-defying masterpieces that delicately fuse autobiography and fiction.

Moreover, French would have to confront the least radiant and most cynical of contemporary writers. In “Conrad’s Darkness,” a superb essay he wrote in 1974, Naipaul defined his preoccupations: “the curious reliance of men on institutions they were yet working to undermine, the simplicity of beliefs and the hideous simplicity of actions, the corruption of causes, half-made societies that seemed doomed to remain half-made.” Declarations of this sort, combined with Naipaul’s abrasive views on India and the developing world, have made many critics in left-liberal circles clench their teeth. Derek Walcott, an old sparring partner, once dubbed him V.S. Nightfall. “Naipaul is saying what the whites want to say but dare not,” C.L.R. James remarked. “They have put him up to it.” Edward Said called him “a kind of belated Kipling [who] carries with him a kind of half-stated but finally unexamined reverence for the colonial order.”

Certain literary soothsayers insist that left-of-center writers have a natural advantage in the nomination process for the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 2001 the Swedish Academy proved them wrong by selecting Naipaul. The citation praised him as “Conrad’s heir” and “a literary circumnavigator, only ever really at home in himself, in his inimitable voice,” and celebrated him as a writer who is “singularly unaffected by literary fashion.” Indeed, French reports that Naipaul was “initially unwilling to take the call from Stockholm, since he was cleaning his teeth.” Like other great writers–Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal and Doris Lessing spring to mind–Naipaul has endeavored to be outrageous and provocative, if not scabrous. French noticed that “creating tension, insulting his friends, family or whole communities left him in excellent spirits.” In 1989, when the Iranian government issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie, Naipaul laconically announced, “It’s an extreme form of literary criticism.”

For Naipaul and his handlers, French was a shrewd and honest choice: a writer not given to extremes. A regular contributor to British newspapers and Indian newsmagazines, and the author of several books (a biography of the British colonial explorer Sir Francis Edward Younghusband, a literary travelogue about Tibet, a history of the Indian independence movement), French is a graceful, confident and subtle writer. Still, before agreeing to the task, he presented Naipaul with two ironclad conditions: a series of candid face-to-face interviews and unrestricted access to his archive at the University of Tulsa, which contains more than 50,000 items, including the diaries of his first wife, Patricia Hale. Naipaul responded with silence; months passed. Eventually, French received a letter of acceptance, “written as if unwillingly in a fast, cramped hand, in violet ink.” Over the years many readers have been drawn to the evocative title Naipaul selected for a novel he published in 1987, The Enigma of Arrival (a 1912 painting by Giorgio de Chirico inspired its title). The World Is What It Is, the product of years of toil, offers a vivid, and sometimes enthralling, portrait of a deeply enigmatic writer.

Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. At the time the country had a population of 400,000, one-third of whom were Indians employed as clerks, agricultural workers, spirit vendors, merchants and small-time shopkeepers. Naipaul’s family had joined those ranks in the late nineteenth century, when his mother’s father migrated to the island as an indentured laborer. Naipaul spent his earliest years in the small country town of Chaguanas, in the house of his imposing and imperious grandmother, whose business acumen in real estate enabled her to rise. Built in “the North Indian style,” the house, as Naipaul explained in 1983 in his “Prologue to an Autobiography,” “had balustraded roof terraces, and the main terrace was decorated at either end with a statue of a rampant lion.” It was crowded. Naipaul’s mother had eight sisters, and each resided at Lion House with her husband and children, one family per room. Hindi was spoken, and vegetarian food was prepared communally in “a dingy, blackened kitchen.” The men usually wore shirts made from flour sacks.

Lion House simmered with intrigue and tension, and occasionally boiled over into violence, a situation rendered with exquisite sadness and comedy in Naipaul’s breakthrough novel, A House for Mr. Biswas (1961). “The family was a totalitarian organization,” Naipaul wrote in the “Prologue.” Decisions “were taken by a closed circle at the top–my grandmother and her two eldest sons-in-law.” (The remaining sons-in-law toiled in virtual serfdom, forced to work on the family property but denied their own spending money; they drowned in bitterness.) It was an arrangement that Naipaul’s father, Seepersad–who, in his son’s words, “dangled all his life in a half-dependence and half-esteem” between two groups of powerful relatives–found suffocating. “What happens in that kind of awful set-up,” Naipaul informed French, “is that lots of quarrels break out between people, and those quarrels were my training for life, my training in life and society–propaganda, alliances, betrayals–all these things. So, in a way, nothing that happened later ever really shocked me.”

The young Naipaul–French refers to him as Vidia–was a gloomy and morose child. He refused to participate in religious thread ceremonies organized by his grandmother; he complained about the food; and he groused about the fumes from the kerosene stove, which aggravated his asthma. He excelled at Queen’s Royal College (the same school C.L.R. James attended), and he was one of four students from Trinidad to win a full scholarship to study in England; he chose Oxford University. According to French, Naipaul was admitted by Peter Bayley, a Fellow of English at University College, who many years later recalled, “because I loved India and had many Indian friends, because of being there for nearly four years in the war, I just didn’t hesitate, just took him.”

Naipaul went to Oxford in 1950. He worked hard, in his literature classes especially: “I want to come top of my group,” he wrote to his parents. “I have got to show these people that I can beat them at their own language.” It was Seepersad who, in a powerful and lasting way, instilled the literary vocation in his son. Seepersad read Dickens, O. Henry, Somerset Maugham, J.R. Ackerley and R.K. Narayan, and he wrote fiction himself, in bed with a pencil. Since 1929 Seepersad had been a reporter for the Trinidad Guardian, a stodgy paper then being revitalized by an energetic editor from London, who brought a Fleet Street sensibility and “a tourist’s eye” to Trinidad’s local excitements–“French fugitives from Devil’s Island, voodoo in negro backyards, Indian obeah, Venezuelan vampire bats,” in V.S. Naipaul’s words.

At Oxford Naipaul received a steady stream of letters from his “Pa,” which contained snapshots of his life at the newspaper (“The Guardian is taking all out of me–writing tosh. What price salted fish and things of that sort. Actually that is my assignment for tomorrow! It hurts”); inquiries for minutiae about the social and intellectual life at Oxford (“write me weekly of the men you meet; tell me what you talked; how they talked”); requests for books; and advice on writing (“Read Conrad for intensity of expression, but for the most part be yourself”). In late 1953 Naipaul received word that heart disease had killed his father at 47, and he dispatched a telegram to Trinidad: “He Was the Best Man I Knew Stop Everything I Owe to Him Be Brave My Loves Trust Me–Vido.”

With his father gone and his prospects in London few, Naipaul, having taken his degree, nearly unraveled. “Our family was in distress,” he recalled in the “Prologue,” referring to his mother and younger siblings, who were in urgent need of money. “I should have done something for them, gone back to them. I couldn’t go back.” Trinidad, he had written to his mother, was too small (“40 X 40 miles”), the values “are all wrong, and the people are petty.” He wouldn’t even return for a visit until he had achieved some notoriety in Britain. Naipaul’s mental condition was uncertain: he had suffered a nervous breakdown at Oxford, what he called “a great depression verging on madness.” His destination was not Trinidad but Grub Street, and French provides a rich account of Naipaul’s first year in London: he lived in a rat-infested basement and was rebuffed by numerous employers. When his girlfriend, Patricia Hale, suggested he look for a clerical position, he responded with a smoldering letter: “The people in authority feel my qualifications fit me only for jobs as porters in kitchens, and with the road gangs. My physique decrees otherwise.” That morose child in Trinidad was now a penurious drifter in London: “No fire in my room for two days and only tea & toast in my stomach. That is what the whole policy of the Free World amounts to. Naipaul, poor wog, literally starving, and very cold.” In December 1954 the BBC Caribbean Service offered him a position in London; decades later he admitted to an interviewer, “That saved my life, really.”

Pat, whom Naipaul married in 1955, implored him to write. “Leisure kills a writer unless he’s about sixty and has led a very active life,” she told him in a letter. So at age 22, on an old BBC typewriter and on smooth “non-rustle” BBC script paper, he typed out the first sentence of Miguel Street: “Every morning when he got up Hat would sit on the banister of his back verandah and shout across, ‘What happening there, Bogart?'” The book, a collection of wry, melancholy stories written from a child’s perspective, chronicled the denizens, drifters and dreamers Naipaul had known in the streets of Port of Spain, the city to which the Naipaul family had relocated in 1938. Most of his subjects were Indians. We encounter, among others, a man whose wife runs off, after which he converts his house into a brothel for American sailors, and a boy who dreams of becoming a doctor but ends up carting trash on the streets. Naipaul returned to Trinidad in 1956 and found himself face to face with the man on whom he modeled Hat, the griot of Miguel Street and a central character in the book. “He really is a surly man,” Naipaul wrote to Pat. “We never were really friends. He only knew me as the bright boy in the street. Yet he gave me a choice mango the other day. He told my mother, ‘I have a mango for Vido.’ And when he saw me he just gave me the mango.”

At the time Trinidad was hurtling toward independence, and French skillfully evokes the atmosphere of political turmoil and transition there. Hindu politicians were reeling from the creation of a largely black political party led by Dr. Eric Williams, author of Capitalism and Slavery (1944). Naipaul’s uncle Simbhoo was running for office, and one of his rallies ended in a riot involving bottles and knives. When Williams’s party won at the polls, Naipaul shared his reactions with Pat in language he knew would inflame her liberal sensibilities: “With the present government of noble niggers, all sorts of racialist laws might be passed…. Indians are talking of leaving, so are the Chinese.” (Naipaul would always be concerned about the safety of the Indian diaspora.) But the election gave him fresh material for a novel, The Suffrage of Elvira, a sly comedy about electoral machinations in provincial Trinidad. By the time it was published in 1958–to glowing reviews from Anthony Powell and Kingsley Amis–Naipaul had returned to London. He had left the BBC and was reviewing books for The New Statesman while formulating the novel that would become Biswas.

Serious writers require patrons, and in 1960 Naipaul found an unlikely one: Eric Williams, who was keen to lure gifted expatriates back to the island with open-ended fellowships. Williams wanted Naipaul, whose writing he admired, to produce a nonfiction book on the Caribbean. Naipaul accepted the fellowship, and he and Pat returned to Trinidad, where they lived on a stipend provided by Williams. They traveled to British Guiana, Jamaica, Suriname and Martinique at his expense. Williams even arranged to have his government purchase 2,000 copies of what became The Middle Passage. Naipaul launched his career as a travel writer by accepting handouts from what he had branded a “government of noble niggers.”

Like much of the nonfiction that would eventually flow from Naipaul’s pen, The Middle Passage is an engaging and disconcerting work. It contains incisive reporting and observation; lofty, provocative historical analysis; melancholy rumination (“Carnival in Trinidad has always depressed me”); gallows humor; lean, economical, elegant prose; and a pessimistic and sarcastic authorial perspective given to lashes of mockery and derision (“the malarial sluggishness of the Guianese is known throughout the Caribbean”). Underneath it all, a restless intelligence was at work. When setting foot in a country, Naipaul endeavored to measure its amnesia about the past, its ability to repair itself in the present and its economic prospects for the future. In his chapter on Martinique, he observed:

[It] produces nothing apart from sugar, rum and bananas. Couldn’t they even make their own coconut oil for the margarine factory that employs seven people? Surely coconuts can grow in Martinique? “Impossible,” says one. “The man is mad. Pay no attention,” says another. And so the bickering goes on and coconut oil is imported, and milk is flown in from France…by the Air France milk plane. And because Martinique is part of France, her unique rum cannot be exported direct to North or South America, but must first cross the Atlantic to Paris and be redirected from there, enriching middlemen all the way.

By and large, reviewers in the West Indies disliked The Middle Passage. One critic likened Naipaul to “a surgeon who has surrendered to despair.” In London, however, Evelyn Waugh hailed Naipaul’s “exquisite mastery of the English language” and praised him for being “free of delusion about independence and representative government for his native land.” Naipaul welcomed the acclaim, but he would never be entirely at ease among the British literary elite. Once he found himself in an elevator with Waugh’s son Auberon, who inquired, “May I call you Vidia?” Naipaul replied, “No, as we’ve just met, I would rather you called me Mr. Naipaul.”

When Naipaul was growing up in Trinidad, India was a resting place of sorts for his imagination, “a country out in the void beyond the dot of Trinidad,” an “area of darkness.” Yet the physical remnants of India were scattered around him: tattered string beds “never repaired because there was no one with this caste skill in Trinidad”; plaited straw mats; brass vessels; books emblazoned with thick, oily ink; brass bells, gongs and camphor burners; a stick of sandalwood; pictures of Hindu deities. In his teenage imagination, fragments from the void coalesced into something rather sinister. In 1949, in a letter to his older sister Kamla, who was studying in India, Naipaul informed her, “I am planning to write a book about these damned people and the wretched country of theirs, exposing their detestable traits. Grill them on everything.” In his late 20s, as he grappled with the West Indies in a systematic way, his rancor toward India melded into curiosity, and in 1962 he and Pat embarked on a yearlong journey through the subcontinent, which took them to Delhi, Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, Benares, Nagpur and Kashmir. An account of that trip, An Area of Darkness, was published in 1964, and French calls it “the most influential study of India published since independence.” Like most of Naipaul’s nonfiction, his first book about India was, to a considerable extent, a sly provocation: he wanted to dazzle and enlighten his readers but also to shock them with sentences of this sort: “I had seen Indian villages: the narrow, broken lanes with green slime in the gutters, the choked back-to-back mud houses, the jumble of filth and food and animals and people, the baby in the dust, swollen-bellied, black with flies, but wearing its good-luck amulet.”

French’s account of the making of An Area of Darkness is the most stirring chapter in The World Is What It Is. His own journalistic experience in India furnished him with the knowledge, sympathy and contacts to trace Naipaul’s footsteps. With brio and wit, he dissects the reportorial methods that Naipaul would employ in nearly all of his subsequent travel books. Prominent friends and acquaintances in Britain and the United States would connect Naipaul with notables on the ground (diplomats, newspaper editors, intellectuals, theater directors, poets, government officials, sophisticated expatriates), some of whom would then be pressed into service as hosts, interlocutors, fixers and guides. A few of his Indian hosts came to despise Naipaul (“he was snobbish…a thoroughly nasty human being,” recalled one); others were deeply impressed (“he asked a lot of questions, he was a wonderful listener”). At the end of each working day, Naipaul, with unyielding discipline, would return to his hotel room or guesthouse and write up his notes.

India was a jolting experience for him. One of his guides, Dr. J.P. Singh, recalled that “Naipaul was short with the hotel chaps…. He used to say they are very, very lazy chaps…I thought he was having all this anger and contempt primarily because he wanted the country to develop.” Pat, who urged him to modulate and soften his views on India, got an earful as well: “Imagine waiters in the filthiest clothes and with the filthiest hands,” Naipaul told her, “serving tea in cups which they arrange in their usual finger-dunking way.” Some of his hosts shrewdly perceived that Naipaul felt neglected in India. The esteemed Khushwant Singh told French that he found Naipaul “reserved, pleasant and I think a little disappointed that he hadn’t been given the kind of reception he expected as a son of the country who had done well.”

When Naipaul finally left India and returned to London, he wasted no time in writing to his Indian friends. He was customarily blunt:

The lavatories at Palam [airport] were literally covered with shit and the aerodrome officer could only speak of the shortage of staff (i.e. sweepers)…. So goodbye to shit and sweepers; goodbye to people who tolerate everything; goodbye to all the refusal to act; goodbye to the absence of dignity; goodbye to the poverty; goodbye to caste and that curious pettiness which permeates that vast country…. Probably I am mad. But it seems to me that everything conspires to keep India down.

As a biographer, French is alive to the nuances, quirks and contradictions in Naipaul’s character, and he has an acute sense of his subject’s displacement and rootlessness. When Naipaul was traveling in Martinique, he expressed nostalgia “for the good humour, tolerance, amorality and general social chaos of Trinidad.” Did he really miss Trinidad, or was his nostalgia a convenient fiction that quelled his sense of being adrift? The land of his ancestors, too, began to exert a pull on him. A few months after returning to London, Naipaul acknowledged to a friend, “I suppose I miss India more than I imagined.”

With The Middle Passage and An Area of Darkness, Naipaul produced rough-edged journalistic reckonings with his past: he traveled, he saw, he wrote. His distinctive personality marked every page of these two books. In 1966 he commenced the research for a very different kind of book: a full-scale history of Trinidad from 1592 to 1813, based almost entirely on documents in the British Museum and the London Library. Early detractors who viewed Naipaul as a Waugh-like Tory might have been taken aback by The Loss of El Dorado, a stupendous indictment of Spanish and British imperialism. Published in 1969, the book is Naipaul’s most abundant canvas, a Diego Rivera mural in words teeming with adventurers, cannibals, pirates, outlaws, slaves, hangmen, tavern owners, mercenaries and Jacobins. The Loss of El Dorado is history written with remarkable skill and poise, and the second half of the book, “The Torture of Luisa Calderon,” contains Naipaul’s most hypnotic language. Parts of El Dorado call to mind Bernal Díaz’s eyewitness account of Cortés’s triumph in Mexico, The Conquest of New Spain. With its sinewy prose, its innovative use of primary sources and its serene contempt for the machinery of empire, it also resembles Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore, and the account of Luisa Calderon’s arrest recalls Gabriel García Márquez’s novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Naipaul’s editors were impressed: Robert Gottlieb at Knopf felt that it was “a very important as well as very beautiful book, and…it will endure.” Indeed, it was one of the six books mentioned in Naipaul’s Nobel citation. It sold just 3,000 copies in the United States.

Years ago, in a sparkling reminiscence of Naipaul in Granta, Diana Athill, his editor in London, noted that his books tended to sell poorly. Even so, it is surprising to learn precisely how destitute Naipaul was in the 1960s, a time when Anthony Powell declared him Britain’s “most talented and promising younger writer.” French reports that between 1960 and 1969, Naipaul’s gross income after expenses averaged £1,963 a year. “It was a bad time,” Naipaul recalled. “Tears lay just below the surface.” For several years, in an echo of A House for Mr. Biswas, the Naipauls had no home of their own and bounced from place to place. Naipaul’s fortunes began to improve in 1970, when, through the benevolence of friends, he and Pat found a cottage in rural Wiltshire. The rent was £3 a week; they stayed for a decade.

It was a highly productive period for Naipaul. On assignment for Robert Silvers of The New York Review of Books, he reported from Trinidad, Argentina and Zaire, and the essays Silvers published–coruscating, relentless and brilliant–would be collected in The Return of Eva Perón, with The Killings in Trinidad. During Indira Gandhi’s Emergency of 1975, Naipaul produced India: A Wounded Civilization, an X-ray of Hinduism and the Indian psyche written in his usual pitiless style. When he wasn’t working on nonfiction, he wrote the fiction that would cement his reputation: In a Free State (which won the Booker Prize in 1971), Guerrillas and A Bend in the River. (The opening lines of A Bend in the River gave French the title for his book: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”) These three books are dark, brooding, deeply unsentimental depictions of postcolonial Africa and the Caribbean. A Bend in the River unfolds in a chaotic landscape modeled on Mobutu’s Zaire, and like Guerrillas it contains scenes of sexual violence that remain shocking today.

French contends that by the early 1970s, critics and readers were ready for a Naipaulian perspective on the Third World: “A rising disillusion with the post-colonial project in many countries led to Vidia being projected as the voice of truth, the scourge who by virtue of his ethnicity and his intellect could see things that others were seeking to disguise.” Owing to the singularity of his vision, and to his politics (he stood for “high civilization, individual rights and the rule of law”), Naipaul was worthy of such a pulpit, French suggests. “He was the man without loyalties…who would write the truth as he saw it…. His moral axis…was internal, it was himself.” But some of Naipaul’s most attentive readers were dismayed by the extent to which darkness now permeated his work. After reading In a Free State, Peter Bayley, Naipaul’s mentor at Oxford, wrote to his former student, “Perhaps I was wrong to see personal unhappiness, alienation, loneliness, humiliation so clearly behind it all.” Salman Rushdie would later observe that “an affection for the human race” infused Miguel Street, The Suffrage of Elvira and Biswas, but the “dark clouds” that gathered over “Naipaul’s inner world” have “not lifted, but deepened.” Edward Said wanted Naipaul to be like Nadine Gordimer, a writer who examined the Third World with “sympathetic insight” rather than with the despondency of a “scavenger.”

The 1971 Booker Prize, and the success of Guerrillas, brought Naipaul an avalanche of invitations, awards and teaching offers, and in 1978 he spent a year as a visiting professor at Wesleyan. French says his courses were “brilliantly inventive,” but his patience with students who missed deadlines was short: “You are like officials in the Congo,” he informed them. “You are corrupt.” Rancor toward Naipaul was percolating in the American academy, where he became “indefensible.” “Vidia’s response to the growth in his reputation as a villain was to stoke it,” French writes. His rhetorical prod was wielded in a “Trinidian street style.” In response to a barrage of criticism from Said and others, Naipaul made a point, during interviews, of consistently mispronouncing Said’s last name (as the past participle of “say”) and shooing the reporters away: “I don’t know these people…. You must go and talk to Mr. Said about it.”

For the first time in his life, Naipaul began to earn substantial amounts of money. In 1983 Vanity Fair paid $75,000 for his essential “Prologue to an Autobiography,” which was reprinted in Finding the Center. In 1986 William Shawn offered $78,000 for the right to excerpt The Enigma of Arrival in The New Yorker. In Naipaul’s negotiations for fees, old and noted friends were treated shabbily. In the early ’70s, Robert Silvers, who had showcased Naipaul’s work in The New York Review of Books since 1963, borrowed money from a friend to send Naipaul on a reporting trip to Argentina. In 1990 Naipaul and his agent offered extracts to Silvers for $125,000; Silvers could offer $10,000. “Never one to forgive a past favor,” French writes, “the man without loyalties threatened to break his links with The New York Review.”

In 1990, nearly four decades after he arrived penniless in London, Naipaul was knighted. He went alone to the palace, by train, wearing a charcoal gray suit. His personal darkness began to abate slightly. In 1993 Harold Pinter invited Vidia and Pat to view his play No Man’s Land. As Pat would later write to Pinter, “I cannot remember sitting next to Vidia emanating approval and enjoyment to that degree for so long for years and years.” In later books like The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World, the old rage and fury were, to a certain extent, supplanted by elegiac rumination. In a sense Naipaul even reconciled with an India that was no longer down, aligning himself with the Hindu chauvinist Bharatiya Janata Party, which did not endear him to Indian liberals. As he told the Financial Times in 2004, “I am staggered by the amount of intelligence and education that now exists in India and the strivingness of the culture.”

Patrick French conveys a better sense of the man than the work. Focused on the life, he for the most part neglects the books. French devotes just several hundred words of tepid analysis to a description of A House for Mr. Biswas, and his assessment of Naipaul’s best-known work is wan: “The novel…is universal in the way that the work of Dickens or Tolstoy is universal.” French seems to assume that his readers have digested Naipaul’s oeuvre, and so, with certain exceptions, like A Way in the World, he does not describe or analyze the books in any serious detail. With the novels, one longs to hear more about the plot, the tone, the narrative style, the themes and obsessions. With the travel writing and nonfiction, French sidesteps questions and debates that have always swirled around Naipaul’s work: was India in 1975 really a “wounded civilization”? Of The Return of Eva Perón, Edward Said remarked, “There isn’t any real analysis in his essays, only observation”; Joan Didion parried that “he is a writer for whom the theoretical has no essential application.” Is Didion’s defense persuasive? Does French accept the Swedish Academy’s assertion that Naipaul occupies the same rarefied heights as Voltaire?

Naipaul is a virtuoso of English prose, but French has nothing of substance to say about his style, including his scrupulous employment of the semicolon. Nor does French explore the writers who influenced and inspired his subject. Naipaul has an affectionate interest in the work of R.K. Narayan, whose Chekhovian novels, set in the imaginary south Indian town of Malgudi, have lost none of their insight and charm. Naipaul cited Narayan in his Nobel lecture and offered provocative readings of his fiction in An Area of Darkness and India: A Wounded Civilization. French also neglects Conrad. A Bend in the River, as many have noted, owes much to Heart of Darkness. Naipaul was also a close reader of The Secret Agent, and his most wicked thrusts at left-wing charlatans–like Michael X, who engineered grisly murders in Trinidad in 1972–resemble Conrad’s magnificent disgust with London’s anarchist milieu. Perhaps French believes that all these matters are best left to the professors. Whatever the case, a consideration of them would have added intellectual depth to the book.

What does interest French, to a lamentable degree, are the intimate details of Naipaul’s personal and sexual life, and his relationships with three women in particular. This preoccupation distorts the book’s architecture and almost derails its narrative: French’s normally crisp prose becomes slack, gossipy, slightly incoherent and meddlesome. Naipaul married Patricia Hale when they were both 22. He neglected to give her a ring (she purchased one herself), and he soon misplaced the marriage certificate; his callousness and cruelty knew no bounds. In some notes he scribbled in 2001, Naipaul confessed, “The relationship–on VSN’s side–was more than half a lie. Based really on need.” He was speaking not of sexual need but rather of emotional, domestic and professional fortification. He came to rely on Pat as a reader and critic of his work. French, who is deeply and properly sympathetic to Pat, shows in numbing detail how she served as her husband’s amanuensis; he even compares her to “great, tragic, literary spouses” like Sonia Tolstoy, Jane Carlyle and Leonard Woolf.

In April 1972, while reporting from Buenos Aires, Naipaul met a 30-year-old Anglo-Argentine named Margaret Gooding, whom French describes as “tempestuous, cynical, sexy.” On the same day he met Gooding, Naipaul received a letter from Pat, vacationing in Trinidad, who wrote, “Look after yourself and dress sensibly but don’t pile on the clothes indoors with central heating…. I suppose you would be impossible if you were here but I would not mind.” Naipaul began an affair with Gooding, one that would last twenty-four years, and he soon informed Diana Athill, “I am having carnal pleasure for the first time in my life.” The affair, in addition to Naipaul’s later public confession that he had patronized prostitutes, had a devastating effect on Pat (she succumbed to cancer in 1996). “She suffered,” Naipaul told French in 2005. “It could be said that I had killed her. It could be said. I feel a little bit that way.”

French devotes many pages to Naipaul’s affair with Gooding (fewer pages would have sufficed), and not many details escape his attention: “Vidia flew to meet Margaret in… Marrakech at the Hotel Mamounia, where their bill listed little but ‘étage’ (room service), suggesting they were too busy to leave the room.” Scrutinizing hotel receipts, peering through keyholes: this is hardly French at his finest. He does provide a chilling coda, however. During the final months of Pat’s life, Naipaul was reporting from Pakistan, where he met a journalist named Nadira Khannum Alvi. He dumped his longtime mistress and began an affair with Nadira, who arrived at Naipaul’s home in Britain six days after Pat’s death. Several weeks later she became Lady Naipaul.

Despite its shortcomings, The World Is What It Is is a formidable achievement. It contains a remarkable accumulation of rich, minute detail; covers a vast amount of history and politics in an effortless manner; and navigates difficult emotional territory with a very high degree of compassion, subtlety and authority. The book is engrossing, with French pulling surprises out of his hat from the opening pages. A startling sentence appears in the introduction: “He had the opportunity to read the completed manuscript, but requested no changes.” A book launched with a note scrawled in violet ink wasn’t torpedoed by Naipaul’s red pen. Reviewers in Britain (where the book was published last spring) have commented on Naipaul’s unusual decision to expose himself to withering biographical scrutiny. John Carey put it nicely in theSunday Times: “He has chosen to submit himself to the truth-telling and ruthless objectivity that have always characterized his own work.” (French calls it “an act of narcissism and humility.”) In a speech in Tulsa in 1994, Naipaul declared, “The lives of writers are a legitimate subject of inquiry; and the truth should not be skimped.” And so it wasn’t.

One of the more damaging articles concerning the United Nations Oil for Food scandal appeared in a New York newspaper on November 26, 2004, under the byline of Claudia Rosett. In that article Rosett revealed that Kojo Annan, the son of the UN Secretary General, had remained on the payroll of the Swiss firm Cotecna, which had a UN contract in Iraq, for years after he had supposedly ended his relationship with the company. The piece had an instant ripple effect: Three days later William Safire devoted his New York Times column to Rosett’s revelations and demanded that Kofi Annan resign from his post. Senator Norm Coleman, whose subcommittee was then investigating the Oil for Food program, joined the chorus two days later in the Wall Street Journal with a piece titled “Kofi Annan Must Go,” a piece that also cited Rosett’s reporting.

Rosett’s article did not appear in the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal or the Daily News–all of which are routinely scathing about the UN–but in the New York Sun, a pugnacious conservative daily that sprang up in lower Manhattan a few months after the attacks of September 11.

When the Sun was born in 2002, media soothsayers predicted that it would never find a permanent place in New York’s brutally competitive newspaper market and that the hearse would arrive within two years. But the Sun is still here, and on April 16 it will mark its fifth anniversary. Although it is funded by a coterie of wealthy individuals, published on a shoestring and edited by a tenacious journalist, Seth Lipsky, the paper is not a financial success: Last year Lipsky told journalism students at Columbia that the Sun lost $1 million a month. But those losses amount to pocket change for the proprietors, whose investment and ongoing commitment have yielded something else: a broadsheet that injects conservative ideology into the country’s most influential philanthropic, intellectual and media hub; a paper whose day-to-day coverage of New York City emphasizes lower taxes, school vouchers and free-market solutions to urban problems; a paper whose elegant culture pages hold their own against the Times in quality and sophistication; a paper that breaks news and crusades on a single issue; a paper that functions as a journalistic SWAT team against individuals and institutions seen as hostile to Israel and Jews; and a paper that unapologetically displays the scalps of its victims.

Ten years ago I published a Nation cover story titled “Why America Needs a Labor Daily,” in which I attempted to revive an idea that A.J. Liebling had floated in the late 1940s: that the American labor movement should create a daily newspaper to counteract the probusiness–and antiunion–bias of the mainstream press. A month later, Seth Lipsky, whom I had never met, invited me to his office at the Forward newspaper, situated in the Workmen’s Circle Building on East 33rd Street in Manhattan. I found myself gazing at a bald, diminutive man who looked as though he had just stepped out of a Charles Dickens novel, a man whom Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker has described as “Pickwickian.”

Lipsky is an intriguing figure in New York journalism. As a high school student he kept the masthead of the New York Times tucked away in his wallet. After graduating from Harvard he went to Vietnam as a combat reporter. In 1971 he launched a nineteen-year career at the Wall Street Journal, during which time he served on the editorial page under the late Robert Bartley and assimilated much of Bartley’s ferocious intellectual and rhetorical manner. In 1990 Lipsky was hired by the Forward, once the bible for the Yiddish-speaking masses of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, to produce a weekly edition of the paper in English. A neoconservative admirer of Ronald Reagan, Lipsky immediately ran into political difficulties: Early on he received a letter from the late Arthur Hertzberg, who declared that the editors of the old Yiddish Forward “did not create and maintain a newspaper of socialists and social democrats for their inheritance to become now, in English, an echo of the Wall Street Journal.” Lipsky, whose heroes include Ze’ev Jabotinsky (the militant Zionist who admired Mussolini), Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon, certainly did push the Forward rightward–a 1994 editorial called for the bombing of North Korea’s nuclear facilities–but he also won praise for his editorial finesse. “No matter how conservative Lipsky may be on certain subjects, especially foreign affairs,” David Remnick wrote thirteen years ago in The New Yorker, “his stewardship of the paper has been open and daring.”

But Lipsky had higher ambitions than to publish a weekly edition of the Forward. He summoned me to his office a decade ago to encourage me to start a labor daily but also to boast of his own grand plan: to transform the Forward into a daily, one with a pro-union orientation in line with both the Forward‘s history and my blueprint in The Nation. His scheme seemed grandiose: A top newspaper analyst, John Morton, had told me that a new daily would cost $300 million, and I doubted that Lipsky, sitting in his modest office in the Workmen’s Circle Building, could raise even a fraction of that sum.

I underestimated Lipsky. Three years later he left the Forward, and in 2002 he delivered on his promise to create a new daily (though not, alas, one that stands with organized labor). Today the Sun has four principal investors–men who, Lipsky notes, “are among the most successful financial investors in history.” It’s a group that includes Michael Steinhardt, Lipsky’s former partner at the Forward; Thomas Tisch, a board member of the Manhattan Institute; Bruce Kovner, chair of the American Enterprise Institute and a man ranked by Forbes as the eighty-fifth richest American; and Roger Hertog, chairman emeritus of the Manhattan Institute. In an interview Hertog half-seriously quipped that, owing to the Sun‘s steady financial losses, his involvement in the paper is an example of “delusional behavior.” But he proudly views the Sun as an idea factory for the elite and says he’ll continue to support it into the foreseeable future. (Steinhardt made the same vow, saying, “It’s money well spent.”) “If you just did a random survey of opinion leaders in New York, whether they be cultural or political or business types,” Hertog says, “I think you would find that a very large number read the paper.” Sun watchers concur that Lipsky has captured a limited but influential audience. Says Fred Siegel of Cooper Union, “In New York and Washington it gets read by politicians and intellectuals, and by people in the think-tank world.”

Afew weeks ago I asked Lipsky why he launched a conservative daily in 2002, when New York already had two of them–the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post. “If one drew a quadrant of New York newspapers,” he replied, “there was a center-left broadsheet, the Times. There was a center-left tabloid, the News, and a center-right tabloid, the Post. But there was not, until the Sun, a center-right broadsheet.” (He views the Journal as a national paper with a limited interest in New York City. But it’s hard to agree with his assessment that Mortimer Zuckerman’s Daily News, which has fervently supported the Iraq War, is a center-left publication.) Before Lipsky could launch his center-right broadsheet he needed someone to manage the newsroom, so he brought with him from the Forward a fiery young protégé, Ira Stoll, a Harvard Crimson veteran best known for his website devoted to the daily excoriation of the Times, smartertimes.com. Today Stoll is a busy man: When he is not supervising his fifteen full-time reporters or collaborating with Lipsky on the unsigned editorials (one of which recently urged Dick Cheney to run for President), he is endeavoring to complete a biography of Samuel Adams for the Free Press.

The editorial formula fashioned by Lipsky and Stoll is a peculiar mix of canned political ideology and spry reportage and criticism. Consider a recent issue, March 20, beginning with the front page. The main story concerns the latest developments in a major police shooting in New York, followed by a piece about New York City’s public schools (“Schools Seeing Fast Rise in Bureaucrats”), a dispatch from the state capital (“Spitzer Nears Hospital Deal That Could Isolate Union”), an overview of the rift at the NAACP and a feature about a businessman’s obsession with a 1906 Danish painting. The opinion pages, which usually feature William F. Buckley Jr., Cal Thomas and the scabrous Mark Steyn, contain two unsigned editorials–one calling for school vouchers, the other demanding an end to rent stabilization and rent control–alongside op-ed pieces lashing Human Rights Watch and French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin (“Oh So Civilized, Monsieur”). In the culture section readers are treated to an assessment of Ira Glass’s Showtime debut of This American Life, a review of a concert at Carnegie Hall by the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, a survey of dance photography, an essay about Hesiod and a review by renowned critic Gary Giddins of the DVD release of the film Muriel. All in all, a fabulous read for culture and a tendentious (though not uninteresting) one for politics.

It’s only a slight stretch to say that Israel is to the Sun what gossip is to the New York Post or jockdom is to Sports Illustrated. A portrait of the historian Lucy Dawidowicz once hung in the Chambers Street office of the Sun, and her best-known book provided the Sun with the theme of its first editorial in 2002: “The War Against the Jews.” For Lipsky and Stoll, it’s a war that exists in perpetuity, and some of the Sun‘s most relentless crusading has been undertaken against New York institutions the editors view as hostile to Israel, Zionism and Jews. In late 2003 the Sun published a series of articles and editorials about the Ford Foundation, assailing it for funding Palestinian NGOs accused of anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic behavior at the UN World Conference Against Racism, in Durban in 2001. The articles, which strongly implied that the foundation’s top executives were anti-Semitic, jolted members of Congress into action, and Ford was eventually forced to alter its grant-making procedures in a way that disillusioned many of its admirers [see Sherman, “Target Ford,” June 6, 2006].

In October 2004 the Sun published the first of twenty articles and editorials alleging that Jewish students at Columbia University were experiencing systematic harassment by anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic professors. Some of the stories ran under the tag line “Crisis at Columbia,” and a typical headline declared, “Anti-Defamation League Director: University Fails to Protect Jewish Students.” A number of Columbia’s most distinguished (and longest-serving) Jewish faculty members dismissed the Sun‘s allegations as preposterous, but the Sun‘s drumbeat soon attracted the attention of the Daily News, New York magazine and the Times [see Sherman, “The Mideast Comes to Columbia,” April 4, 2005]. What Lipsky calls “an enormous story” was born, and he is unapologetic about his paper’s unrelenting coverage of Columbia: “Bob Bartley used to say it takes seventy-five editorials to get a law passed.”

Occasionally the Sun uses tactics that would please the ghost of Walter Winchell. In March 2006 Lipsky walked by Ira Stoll’s desk and heard him laughing. And with that laugh a Sun crusade was born. Stoll had been reading a Harvard University working paper by professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, of Harvard and the University of Chicago, respectively, titled “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy.” The barrage began with a piece by reporter Eli Lake, who contacted David Duke and then produced a page-one story announcing that the Walt-Mearsheimer paper was “winning praise from white supremacist David Duke.” (That story was headlined “David Duke Claims to be Vindicated by a Harvard Dean.”) A few days later another Sun story insisted, with no evidence, that the two professors had “culled sections of the paper from neo-Nazi and other anti-Israel hate Web sites.” (Walt and Mearsheimer dismissed the accusation as “absurd”; the link with David Duke, they said, is “guilt by association.”)

In its zeal to demolish Walt and Mearsheimer the Sun also chased their colleagues–including Marvin Kalb, who, like Walt, holds a post at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. A Sun editorial noted that Kalb had recently petitioned the Newspaper Association of America on a historical matter pertaining to Jewish journalists trapped in Hitler’s Germany, and went on, “Now–at a moment when Israelis and Jews everywhere are under attack in a global war against America and Israel launched by Islamofascists–the cat has got his tongue.” The next day the Sun printed a front-page story, “Kalb Upbraids Harvard Dean Over Israel,” in which Kalb proclaimed that the Walt-Mearsheimer paper “clearly does not meet the academic standards of a Kennedy School research paper.” Kalb declined to be interviewed by The Nation. (The same editorial warned Harvard to get its house in order and added, “The Ford Foundation recently had its own learning experience.”)

When I asked Lipsky to delineate the Sun‘s editorial priorities, he included in his list “the United Nations–its scandals, the anti-Israel maneuvering.” The UN is indeed one of the Sun‘s most passionate and enduring obsessions. Lipsky employs a full-time UN correspondent, Benny Avni, who is a sharp thorn in the side of the UN hierarchy and who produced no fewer than 237 pieces in 2006. Edward Mortimer, director of communications under Kofi Annan, was continually exasperated by Avni’s reporting: “I felt that he was systematically putting the most negative, conspiratorial interpretation on practically everything that happened at the UN.” Few topics at the UN are off limits to Avni: In 2005 he somewhat gleefully reported that Mark Malloch Brown, then Annan’s chief of staff, was renting a house from George Soros in Westchester. It was a purely commercial transaction, and Avni alleged no wrongdoing. But the Sun was keen to link Malloch Brown to Soros, who has a prominent place in the Sun‘s pantheon of villains.

Today Malloch Brown, who has left the UN, considers the story to be “totally unfair. It just fell way below minimum journalistic standards of research or ethics.” In his estimation, the Sun is “a pimple on the backside of American journalism.” But he accepts that the paper’s obsession with the UN translates into influence. Regarding Rosett’s reporting on Kojo Annan, he admits the Sun “does punch way above its circulation number, on occasion.” He goes on to say, “Clearly amongst its minuscule circulation were a significant number of diplomats. And so it did at times act as some kind of rebel house paper inside the UN. It fed the gossip mills and what was said in the cafeterias.”

As a business venture the Sun is not exactly flourishing. On its front page the paper proclaims: “150,000 of New York City’s Most Influential Readers Every Day.” But according to its latest audit, the Sun is selling 13,211 hard copies a day and giving away more than 85,000. (By contrast, the Daily News sells about 700,000 copies a day.) In an attempt to lasso subscribers in certain New York ZIP codes, the Sun recently offered free subscriptions for a full year, an unusual way for a newspaper to build circulation.

People who know Lipsky say that in 2006 he was very anxious about the Sun‘s future. Today that anxiety appears to have dissipated: He is enthusiastic about his paper’s website and insists that “the print edition of the Sun is growing sharply, albeit from a small base. I’m highly optimistic.” He likes to recite a famous saying from poker: “lose early, win late.” The paper’s survival depends almost entirely on Lipsky’s ability to manage his wealthy investors, a task in which this journalist-entrepreneur has excelled and for which he is well suited. “The Sun could continue as long as Lipsky’s investors are interested in continuing it,” says Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker. “I’d expect to see it survive for several more years. And they’ll get a boost if the Democrats win the next presidential election.”

FSG: NO PRESSURE HERE

New York City

Farrar, Straus & Giroux appreciates Alexander Cockburn’s and The Nation‘s support of our forthcoming publication of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy [“Beat the Devil,” Feb. 5]. We would like to clarify one point, however. While individuals have expressed unhappiness about our decision to publish this work, to our knowledge there has been no campaign to pressure the house “to abandon its publication,” as Cockburn seems to suggest. Indeed, we made this clear to The Nation‘s fact-checker when asked specifically about the issue.

ERIC CHINSKI,
Farrar, Straus & Giroux

With figures as prominent as Alan Dershowitz and ADL national director Abe Foxman publicly criticizing FSG for signing the book, and since FSG acknowledged having received calls urging them to drop it, Alexander Cockburn’s comment that “pressure is now being exerted” on FSG passed muster with us.    –The Editors

ACLU’s HOUSE DIVIDED

Newark, NJ

As one of the longest-serving members of the ACLU national board (thirty-seven years), I appreciate Scott Sherman’s comprehensive review of recent internal friction [“ACLU v. ACLU,” Feb. 5]. He accurately describes the phenomenal growth and success of the organization over the past five years, thus implicitly acknowledging the extraordinary leadership of executive director Anthony Romero and president Nadine Strossen, as well as the hard work and dedication of hundreds of national and affiliate ACLU employees. Also implicit is the fact that some people do not deal well with institutional renewal, clinging to the past and criticizing the agents of change. I believe that dynamic is at work here.

Certainly Romero, who came to the ACLU from the foundation world, has made a few missteps. Initially, he did not fully comprehend the culture of the ACLU and the eighty-three-member national board’s stubborn insistence on organizational oversight. But he is a fast learner and now has won the overwhelming support of this often fractious board. Still, for reasons hard to fathom, the handful of remaining oppositionists refuse to forgive his past trespasses and continue to exaggerate them.

One of the most outrageous canards spread by the so-called dissidents is the claim that Romero and his closest advisers attempted to purge the ACLU of opponents and muzzle dissent within the organization. I can testify to the falsity of that charge from personal experience. I have served as an ACLU general counsel for thirty-one years, and during most of that tenure I have been very vocal about my strong opposition to ACLU policy on political campaign-finance regulation. Indeed, during my very first meeting with Romero, I told him that it was one of my main goals to overthrow that policy, which he strongly supported. Never has Romero or anyone on the board attempted to muzzle me, and indeed, I have been re-elected each year as general counsel.

The ACLU executive committee and national board have logged many, many hours debating and discussing the internal issues Sherman reviews. These matters have all been resolved in ways that reflect the values and priorities of the ACLU, which remains primarily focused on the extraordinarily serious threats to civil liberties that exist today.

FRANK ASKIN

New York City

I write concerning the controversy surrounding Anthony Romero, particularly his acceptance of foundation funds on the condition that the ACLU not “promote…violence, terrorism, bigotry or the destruction of any state.”

When I came to the NYCLU as a staff lawyer in 1965, it was just beginning to confront its ignoble record of the McCarthy years. It no longer appended to its briefs a statement involving the Communist Party, assuring the court that the ACLU did not favor violent overthrow of the government; it quietly withdrew its prohibition against hiring Communists; it was on its way to recognizing the injustice of its removal from the board of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn because she was a CP member; and it was engaging in some soul searching about its cooperation with J. Edgar Hoover.

Anyone who remembers those times and understands how seriously they compromised the ACLU’s work would be horrified at the idea that it would allow a foundation to condition funds on the ACLU’s pledge not to do anything to “promote” terrorism. In making that pledge, Romero displayed more than ignorance of ACLU history; he legitimized the “war on terror” the same way the ACLU legitimized McCarthyism fifty years ago.

The ACLU is challenging the “war on terror” with uncompromising vigor, as it challenged the government during the McCarthy era. But in the political battle during that era, the ACLU was fatally compromised, becoming something of a collaborator in the government witch hunt, endorsing its goals if not its methods. Today, by agreeing to screen out terrorists, Romero has tacitly acknowledged the legitimacy of the “war on terror,” even while vigorously challenging many of its weapons.

Before the McCarthy era’s loyalty programs, hearings and Smith Act prosecutions, there were already means of rooting out and prosecuting those who meant to do the nation harm, just as there were before the Patriot Act. The “war on terror,” like the McCarthy-era loyalty programs, is motivated not by national security ends but by political ones–ends that by design are antidemocratic. To cooperate, even slightly, as Romero did, is to concede that the government’s intentions, if not its methods, are legitimate.

Issues of money and principle will arise again. Given how Romero came out the first time, I think his detractors rightly worry how he will come out the next time.

ALAN LEVINE

Cambridge, Mass.

While the ACLU board has, as Scott Sherman reports, spoken in favor of Anthony Romero, it continues to fail in its fiduciary duty. Instead of establishing governance mechanisms to assure that transgressions against ACLU policy will not be repeated, the board, as member Vivian Berger tellingly admits, sought to rally around management. Worse, the board undertook to rid itself of internal critics. Thus, ACLU’s unhealed wounds can reopen at any moment. Berger’s attack on critic and former ACLU board member Wendy Kaminer–referring to her “sort of Madame Defarge quality”–is an example of the circle-the-wagons mentality that prevents the board from exercising independent judgment and authority.

Sherman reports that “Kaminer didn’t have enough support to keep her seat” as the Massachusetts affiliate’s representative to the national board and that Massachusetts is “solidly behind Romero.” Kaminer did not run for re-election because I agreed to run in her stead, as someone who agreed with her criticisms but would approach the issues with less heat. I lost 17 to 15, hardly indicating the affiliate’s “solid” support for the ACLU leadership. Further, I disagreed with Kaminer and former executive director Ira Glasser that Romero and ACLU president Nadine Strossen had to go, which is why I did not sign the Save the ACLU website policy statement. But I added a statement of my own decrying the effort, now quite advanced, to cleanse the ACLU leadership of dissidents. This is not how the board of the nation’s premier civil liberties organization exercises good governance.

HARVEY A. SILVERGLATE

Los Angeles

What angers me about the attacks on Anthony Romero and the ACLU is that those pages in The Nation or those stories in the New York Times could have been devoted to alerting the public to how the Bush Administration is violating civil liberties at home and human rights abroad. Those precious column inches could have reported on all the things the ACLU is doing in the courts, through public education and in grassroots organizing to protect the Constitution. And think of the thousands of hours spent by national and local ACLU board members dealing with the critics that could have been spent defending civil liberties.

Has Anthony Romero made mistakes? Of course he has. Should his actions be reviewed by those to whom he reports? Sure they should. Has he learned to consult sooner and more broadly with ACLU leadership when dealing with tough decisions? I bet he has. Has he been an effective, visionary and dynamic executive director at one of the most critical times in ACLU history? You bet he has.

When President Lincoln’s advisers complained about General Grant’s drinking, Lincoln reportedly replied, “Find out what he’s drinking and send a case of it to all my generals.” Despite Romero’s past mistakes (and drinking isn’t one of them), he’s doing a superb job and deserves the support of everyone who cares about the future of our constitutional democracy.

STEPHEN F. ROHDE

SHERMAN REPLIES

Brooklyn, NY

Re Harvey Silverglate’s letter: Days before my piece went to press, I asked Wendy Kaminer, “My understanding is that you didn’t have enough support to keep your seat on the Massachusetts affiliate board. Is that true?” Kaminer replied: “I can’t deny that.”

SCOTT SHERMAN

‘SURGE’ SAVES SUNNIS, SHIITES

Port Orange, Fla.

Re Gary Younge’s “The Illogic of Empire” [“Beneath the Radar,” Feb. 5]: It seems to me that the “surge” in Iraq to prevent Sunnis and Shiites from killing each other is more akin to Britain’s use of its army in Northern Ireland for coming between Catholics and Protestants than to Churchill’s attempt to hang on to the subcontinent. If one takes an antireligious position (a plague on all their houses), it is not important if Muslims kill each other (Iraq), if Christians kill each other (Northern Ireland), if Jews and Muslims kill each other (Israel/Palestine/Lebanon) or if Christians and Muslims kill each other (the former Yugoslavia).

But if one comes from the morality-based secular humanist position, as I presume a lot of Nation readers do, an effort to stop the 100-a-day Sunni/Shiite deaths can only be commended, particularly when one looks at our responsibility for same. It is a form of penance. I believe this position is consistent with being an opponent of the Iraq War from the beginning, as I have been.

RALPH D. SMITH

AROMA-RAMA

Redding, Conn.

Lakshmi Chaudhry’s January 29 “Mirror, Mirror On the Web” laments the low standard that has become, well, standard in this great nation. No argument there. But she is mistaken in suggesting that the desire to be noticed is new, much less confined to our species. Wolves, social creatures who live in packs, roll in things like dead squirrels in order to obtain a bad smell. It is not to mask their own smell (after all, a wolf that rolls in dead squirrel remains smells like a wolf that has rolled in dead squirrel remains). It is to be noticed. It is a strategy for getting attention. Simply put, it is their way of saying, “Hey, look at me! I stink!” For those of us without access to dead squirrels, there’s YouTube.

ERIC RUBURY

ANN & MOLLY, W. & DICK

Lakeview, Ore.

We’ve lost Ann Richards and Molly Ivins, Texas’s sharpest wits. We’re stuck with Bush/Cheney, Texas’s dullest twits.

DOUG TROUTMAN

Last September a group of civil libertarians launched a website, savetheaclu.org, on which they declared: “We come together now, reluctantly but resolutely, not to injure the ACLU but to restore its integrity.” Only a “change in leadership,” they insisted, “will preserve the ACLU.” That website, and those words, marked a new phase in a lengthy campaign to unseat Anthony Romero, the ACLU’s executive director. The website contained a surprise: a pithy and combative declaration from Romero’s retired predecessor, Ira Glasser, who recruited Romero for the top job six years earlier.

Tension at the upper echelons of the ACLU has been evident for some time. On April 22 of last year, the ACLU national board converged on the Princeton Club in Manhattan for its quarterly meeting. A few weeks earlier, in an interview with the conservative New York Sun, board member Wendy Kaminer had criticized a statement by the ACLU’s Washington legislative director. What Kaminer did was hardly unusual: For more than two years she has been an indefatigable critic of the ACLU leadership.

The principal target of her criticism–Anthony Romero–had apparently reached his breaking point. Halfway through the meeting he denounced Kaminer for “attacking his staff” in the Sun. While he was speaking, one board member, Alison Steiner, made a facial expression Romero didn’t appreciate. Kaminer recalls, “Anthony strides down from the podium, he points at Alison, and essentially orders her out of the room.” Romero berated Steiner in the hallway, leaving her shaken. Later in the meeting, South Carolina representative David Kennison belatedly rose to defend Kaminer, after which Romero asked Kennison, too, to step outside. Kennison later claimed that Romero told him that he would “never” apologize to Kaminer, and that he was accumulating a “thick file on her.” “I got frustrated and lost my temper,” Romero subsequently told the New York Times. “I do not have a file on Wendy.”

In late October a second website, voicesfortheaclu.org, was launched by supporters of Romero. That site was spearheaded by some prominent ACLU veterans, including Aryeh Neier, Gara LaMarche and Norman Dorsen, who declared themselves “dismayed by the ongoing attacks on the ACLU and its leadership” and the “disproportionate and distorted coverage…in some quarters of the press.” Since 2004, Stephanie Strom, who covers philanthropy and nonprofits for the New York Times, has written a dozen stories about internal controversies at the ACLU, stories that have infuriated Romero and many of his colleagues at the organization.

It’s a bad time for civil liberties, a time of “extraordinary rendition,” secret deportations, dubious military trials, NSA surveillance, the harassment of librarians and other infringements. The ACLU, founded in 1920, is both a crucial barrier against these threats to our freedom and the best-known defender of the Constitution. But lately it has also become an organization engulfed by a tumultuous family feud, one in which emotions are raw on all sides. Oddly, it’s not a dispute about the ACLU’s overall performance in the five years since Romero took over. To varying degrees, both sides agree that the ACLU’s day-to-day work has been superb under Romero. On savetheaclu.org, Kaminer and Glasser wrote that the “ACLU continues to do a great deal of excellent, important work.” Romero’s supporters argue the point with greater emphasis and feeling. “The ACLU has never performed better,” says Burt Neuborne, a former ACLU legal director who is now a law professor at New York University. “If you drew up a blueprint for a machine to protect civil liberties, you’d literally copy the existing ACLU.”

So what is the row about? The critics proclaim that Romero has made grave mistakes; that those mistakes amount to a firing offense; and that he has betrayed “fundamental ACLU values.” Romero’s supporters say that he is a visionary leader and that his critics are only damaging the ACLU. Glasser’s intervention, and his decision to employ the full range of his polemical, linguistic and strategic abilities in the fight against Romero, has only ratcheted up the tension.

“Ira was an inspirational leader of this organization,” says Howard Simon, who runs the ACLU’s Florida affiliate. “I still have in my files Ira’s old speeches, which I take out to get my juices going again. What makes this such a bad Greek tragedy is that he left the organization with a wonderful reputation and legacy. He has squandered that legacy.” Glasser has a different view: “I join this effort with sadness, but in the firm belief that the core mission of the ACLU is at stake.”

Anthony Romero, 41, grew up in a crime-ridden housing project in the Bronx and received scholarships to attend Princeton and Stanford Law School. He eventually became a senior executive at the Ford Foundation, where he signed off on more than $100 million in grants annually, including a number of large grants to the ACLU. Romero was hired by the ACLU after a competitive search in 2001, and the press release announcing his appointment highlighted the fact that he was Puerto Rican and openly gay. He started a week before 9/11.

When I had lunch with Romero in early November, he was somber. “I’ve made some mistakes,” he told me, “but those mistakes are minor compared with my achievements.” We met again a few weeks later at a location of his choosing: the Warwick Hotel in Manhattan, where his father worked for thirty-nine years, first as a janitor and then as a banquet waiter. Romero was in a better mood: He had just returned from Virginia, where the ACLU was representing Khaled el-Masri, who maintains that he was arrested in 2003 and flown to a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan; the ACLU had argued for the reinstatement of his lawsuit against the CIA.

Sipping a glass of red wine, Romero insisted that the current battle will not distract him from his objectives: “I’m focused on what I want to get accomplished. And that focus has nothing to do with the opinions of a couple of hundred critics and their leaders.” (More than 600 people have signed a petition against Romero at savetheaclu.org.) Maintaining his focus hasn’t been easy; he has had to navigate a perilous minefield in his own backyard. Four times a year Romero appears before the ACLU’s eighty-three-member national board, which is famously disputatious. Says Aryeh Neier, the ACLU’s executive director from 1970 to 1978, a co-founder of Human Rights Watch and now the president of the Open Society Institute, “I’ve never seen anything remotely as contentious.”

Romero’s difficulties can be traced back to 2002, when he signed a consent decree with the New York Attorney General at the time, Eliot Spitzer, to settle a privacy breach that had been discovered on the ACLU website. A company called Virtual Sprockets was responsible for the breach, but Spitzer’s office demanded a $10,000 fine from the ACLU. The terms of the decree required Romero to distribute it to the national ACLU board within thirty days, but he waited six months to do so. Glasser and Kaminer have written that Romero “offered vague and inconsistent explanations of the circumstances surrounding the negotiation, execution, and eventual distribution of the agreement.” They further allege that ACLU president Nadine Strossen and the eleven-member executive committee, the leadership body of the board that oversees the executive director, “declined to reprimand Romero, even though a number of them privately conceded that they believed he had been less than honest with them.” At the Warwick Hotel Romero told me, “I probably was a bit cavalier about it. But $10,000 is not a huge sum of money, and it was fully reimbursed [by Virtual Sprockets] to the ACLU. Had it been a million-dollar fine coming from our bottom line, I would have paid a lot more attention to it.”

Then, in April 2004, Romero quietly put his signature on a Ford Foundation grant letter that contained a dubious clause: “By countersigning this grant letter, you agree that your organization will not promote or engage in violence, terrorism, bigotry or the destruction of any state.” Dissident board members Kaminer and Michael Meyers viewed that language as disgraceful, and believe that Romero and the ACLU should have vigorously opposed it [see Sherman, “Target Ford,” June 5, 2006]. Upon questioning Romero, the critics learned that he had done more than sign the grant letter: He had privately advised Ford on how to craft it. After vigorous debate, the ACLU ultimately refused more than $1 million in Ford money, which Romero wanted for the organization. “The mistake I made,” Romero told me, “was in not appreciating the civil liberties implications” of Ford’s grant language; he also says that he should not have signed the Ford document without first consulting his board.

In July 2004, after the board concluded a four-hour debate on the Ford controversy, Romero, in the face of explicit questions from Kaminer and Meyers, revealed that he had previously signed another questionable agreement, this one from the Combined Federal Campaign, a government program that allows federal employees to allocate funds to charities and nonprofits. After 9/11, the CFC demanded that its recipients certify that they do not “knowingly employ” people found on federal and international antiterrorism “watch lists”–critics call them “blacklists”–which have been shown to be sweeping and inaccurate. The critics, appalled by the CFC’s screening requirements, demanded to know whom Romero had consulted before signing the CFC contract. He replied that he had acted on the “advice of counsel.” The critics insist, then and now, that there was no counsel, and that Romero misled the board. The ACLU temporarily withdrew from the CFC, a move that cost the organization an estimated $500,000 in 2004.

Even Romero’s most ardent supporters believe that he seriously botched the CFC matter. Today he admits that he should have immediately brought the grant application to the executive committee of the board (it took him more than five months to do so); and he blames the government for its excessive regulation of CFC recipients. When I asked Romero for the name of his “counsel,” a sheepish grin appeared on his face. “I’m also a licensed attorney in New York,” he confesses. “I was serving as my own lawyer.”

Recalling the controversies of 2004, Romero conveys the impression that his worst blunders were not ethical or administrative, but tactical. He regrets that he was not able to vanquish his enemies on the board. “The biggest mistake I made,” he says, “was not appreciating how [the various controversies] could be spun and framed to my detriment.” He laments that his detractors were able to successfully “attach certain labels and criticisms that would be hard to explain away.”

In the wake of these controversies–which Romero’s supporters insist were blown wildly out of proportion by the critics and the Times–the ACLU board could have elected to fire Romero. He kept his job, in large part because many of his colleagues viewed him as young, inexperienced and overwhelmed by the complexities of running the ACLU after 9/11. Burt Neuborne believes that Romero needed a powerful mentor inside the organization, one akin to Norman Dorsen, who was the ACLU’s president from 1976 to 1991. According to Neuborne, the current feud “wouldn’t have happened if Norman were the president.” He elaborates: “He would have seen it coming. He would have told Anthony what to do. He would have guided him. Anthony was essentially on his own. When Norman’s hand went off the tiller at ACLU, it lurched a bit.” (These days the hand of Norman Dorsen, who is also on the NYU law faculty, is again evident at the ACLU, in an advisory capacity.)

Many current board members vociferously insist that Romero’s mistakes must be viewed in the larger context of his accomplishments, which are indeed impressive: He doubled the size of the full-time staff in the ACLU’s national office, from 186 to nearly 400; he raised staff salaries; he lifted the ACLU’s membership from 300,000 to 550,000; he nearly doubled both the total revenue of the ACLU and the net assets of the ACLU Foundation; he brought in new support from foundations; and he launched a TV series.

Supporters also point to a long list of ACLU achievements: its defense of aliens deported from the United States after 9/11; its legal challenge to the NSA spying program; its innovative use of the Freedom of Information Act, which led to the release of more than 100,000 pages of government documents relating to torture and abuse in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay; and its various challenges to the Patriot Act, especially Section 505, which gives the FBI power to obtain sensitive records without judicial approval.

Top legal experts echo Romero’s supporters. “I would give the ACLU a grade of A since 9/11,” says University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone. David Cole of Georgetown University Law Center (and The Nation‘s legal affairs correspondent), who supports Romero, agrees. “They’ve done a superb job in defending civil liberties, doing public education on civil liberties and challenging a variety of Bush Administration measures,” says Cole. “They have also galvanized a large segment of the American population in defense of civil liberties.”

The battles of 2004, combined with the aggressive coverage in the Times, created deep divisions within the ACLU board. Longtime board member Vivian Berger, emeritus professor of law at Columbia, says that many of her board colleagues felt obligated to rally around Romero: “The critics were so vicious toward him, trying to make a big deal out of every little thing,” says Berger. “And here’s Anthony, trying to fight off the forces of evil in the country and the world. We had to protect him, to some extent, just because we were afraid he would go under, which does not mean we never criticized him; which does not mean that many of us did not speak to him privately, myself included. The extreme nastiness of the dissidents had the countereffect of naturally making people circle the wagons.”

When Berger talks about the “dissidents,” she is primarily referring to Wendy Kaminer and Michael Meyers, who launched the initial onslaught against Romero. Until he left recently, Meyers had served on the ACLU board for twenty-four years. He is a controversial and contentious figure. He grew up poor in the South Bronx and Harlem, where his older brother was killed in a mugging, and has worked as a staff member of the NAACP and as a columnist for the New York Post. To his supporters–including the writer Nat Hentoff, who demanded Romero’s resignation in the Village Voice and USA Today–Meyers is a man “of unbending integrity and independence.” To his detractors, he is an exasperating presence. Aryeh Neier allows, “He is not someone who could ever last in any institution. He always wanted to call attention to himself. I would never consider hiring him. He would be impossible.”

“We’ve lost the ACLU,” Meyers lamented in October 2005, when I first began to follow the dispute. Regarding Romero, Meyers comes right to the point: “There have been serious violations of ACLU policy, protocols, philosophy, and I think the board made a serious mistake in hiring Anthony Romero.” Why? “This guy can’t think. He can’t talk. He can’t write. He’s not an intellectual leader, and therefore he’s an embarrassment.” (Meyers says that he preferred another candidate for executive director.) Meyers does credit Romero in one area: “This guy’s raised a lot of money. I think we should have hired him as our fundraiser, as our director of development.”

When Meyers began to publicly excoriate the ACLU leadership, those leaders moved quickly to confront him. Meyers says he got a call in July 2004 from Nadine Strossen, who told him, “We are asking people not to talk to the media.” Meyers replied, “Well, you know, Nadine, you can’t remind me of that because you know the policy is specific.” (ACLU bylaws guarantee the right of board members to express their personal views.) Strossen: “I thought you’d say that.” Meyers: “So why are you calling me?” In retrospect, the efforts by Strossen and others at the ACLU to restrain Meyers only served to galvanize and infuriate him, and contributed to the cycle of recrimination that ensued. In 2005 Meyers was voted off the board by colleagues who were furious at him, but he remains an energetic opponent of Romero, and his agile mind and sharp tongue were on display in recent polemics with Romero’s supporters in the online Huffington Post.

Kaminer, a freelance journalist in Boston, was Meyers’s comrade in the trenches: A fourteen-page chronology she wrote in late 2004 for the board of directors of the ACLU’s Massachusetts affiliate, which she then represented, articulates the case against Romero with clarity and precision. Kaminer’s crusade against the leadership, and her frequent quotations in Strom’s Times stories, enraged many of her colleagues on the board. Vivian Berger refers to Kaminer’s “intransigent righteousness, humorlessness, sort of Madame Defarge quality.” In an August 2004 posting on the ACLU’s internal listserv, Berger pointedly inquired, “What exactly do you want us to do now, Wendy? Do you want [us] to ask Anthony to resign?” Replied Kaminer, “I want the ACLU leadership always to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, to acknowledge frankly and fearlessly governance problems and policy misjudgments and address them effectively.” Kaminer also demanded a “committee of inquiry” to investigate Romero’s transgressions, which the board has never agreed to. Kaminer did not run for re-election in 2006, and no longer serves on the national board. Her rhetoric and behavior alienated quite a few members of the Massachusetts affiliate board, and Kaminer didn’t have enough support to keep her seat. Still, she remains a formidable adversary of Romero, and her knowledge of the ACLU wars is encyclopedic.

By late 2005 the strife had, by and large, reached a standstill. And then two events occurred that significantly increased the level of acrimony and recrimination. The first came in the fall of that year, when the ACLU management unveiled new rules regarding employee confidentiality and technology use, rules that had to be signed by staff members at the national office. One clause read, “You agree that you will…not disclose ACLU Confidential Information to anyone outside the ACLU unless you have been explicitly authorized to do so by your Senior Staff Member or your Departmental Head.” The new rules drew an anonymous (and outraged) letter from staff members, who complained that the agreement would “redefine ‘confidentiality’ in an overbroad and vague way, vesting in management the authority to define a wide variety of information as confidential.” The letter also expressed the fear that employee e-mail would be monitored by management. “If we worked somewhere else we would be complaining to the ACLU,” the letter declared.

Romero says the proposed rules were “a response to the fact that we had a consultant who walked away with an entire donor list and thought it was appropriate to send it to a newspaper reporter”–Strom of the Times. (Strom declined to discuss her reporting.) Romero explains that his staff had to understand that “what was on their computers and databases was not theirs but the ACLU’s. There were certain lines that needed to be drawn.” Would the proposed rules have entailed the monitoring of staff e-mails? “The idea that we would monitor our employees’ e-mails is farfetched,” Romero says. What’s clear is that the proposed rules–which were ultimately shelved–provided ammunition to Romero’s critics, who saw them as an attempt to crush internal dissent at the national office.

And then, last May, an eleven-member committee of the national board–whose members had been asked by the board to produce a report defining the “rights and responsibilities of Board members,” with an emphasis on fiduciary responsibilities and confidentiality–presented their findings to their colleagues. One board member who saw an early draft of the report correctly predicted that it would provoke a “whole lot of screaming.” Indeed, it’s clear now that any attempt to circumscribe the free-speech rights of ACLU board members was destined to fail. The critics immediately assailed the report, focusing on passages like this one: “a [board member] may publicly disagree with an ACLU policy position, but may not criticize the ACLU Board or staff.”

For the critics, that language amounted to both a “gag rule” and a legal framework for the impeachment of dissident board members. After the Times got hold of the story, and after an official in the New York State Attorney General’s office informally warned the ACLU that the proposed rights and responsibilities language was unacceptable, Romero spoke out against it at the June 2006 board meeting. In the end, the rights and responsibilities report was also shelved. Six months later, Romero still seems bruised by the fisticuffs that erupted: “The board,” he says, “was searching for solutions to what was a difficult situation. Previously held norms of board behavior and board decorum were not working any longer. There were [board] colleagues who preferred talking with the press rather than talking with their colleagues.”

The critics are convinced that from the start Romero fully approved of the proposed “gag rule.” Even some of Romero’s most prominent supporters see some truth in that charge. Burt Neuborne says that he privately questioned Romero about it, and was told by him, “It was an effort to explain to people that when you are on a board, there is sometimes a duty not to leak information that can harm the organization’s ability to perform its mission.” Neuborne says he replied: “If you want to have a board orientation class, have a board orientation class, but don’t have rules.” He adds: “It was a misstep. It was a road that they never should have gone down.” Would Romero have been content with the rights and responsibilities language if the board had approved it? “Anthony would have been perfectly comfortable with it, even if he didn’t push it,” Neuborne says.

Ira Glasser’s emergence as a critic of Romero has inspired some civil libertarians to pay closer attention to the feuding at the ACLU. “I take his perspective very seriously,” says historian Stanley Kutler. “He fought the good fight. If Ira Glasser says something publicly, I’m going to listen to it.”

When Glasser became executive director in 1978, the ACLU was reeling from the crisis in Skokie, where it defended the right of Nazis to march though a largely Jewish suburb of Chicago. When he took over, the national ACLU had a cumulative deficit of nearly $500,000. When he retired, the organization possessed assets of more than $100 million. Almost everyone interviewed for this article praised Glasser’s performance as executive director. But it wasn’t all smooth sailing: In 1993 former Washington Post reporter Morton Mintz charged Glasser with soliciting and accepting $500,000 from Philip Morris between 1987 and 1992. He did so, Mintz alleged, without initially informing the board–an allegation Glasser denied.

In recent months, a significant portion of the goodwill Glasser accumulated during his tenure has evaporated. Writing in the Huffington Post, Gara LaMarche, vice president of the Open Society Institute, spoke for many Romero supporters when he declared, “I am sure [Glasser] has persuaded himself he is acting on high principle. I hope he still has a few good friends around to tell him what so many are saying: This is no way to end a distinguished career.” Many ACLU board members believe that Glasser misses his old job, and that he is envious of Romero’s success. “I think Ira left too soon,” says Susan Herman. “He retired quite young. I think had he known that 9/11 was coming, he wouldn’t have left.” Glasser retorts that “remarks like Susan’s…are uninformed, intellectually dishonest and should not be taken seriously except as a reflection of [her] refusal to confront what the critics are saying.”

Glasser’s emergence has rekindled ancient rivalries within the ACLU. Glasser and Neier, for instance, have both occupied the top jobs at the New York Civil Liberties Union and the national ACLU, and their relationship has been frosty for decades. In a recent interview at the Open Society Institute, Neier was full of scorn for the critics, and full of praise for Romero. Neier wore an elegant blue pinstriped suit, and sat with his leg swung over a chair. From that relaxed pose he hurled poisonous darts at Glasser: “Ira’s greatest skill is his skill at manipulation,” Neier said calmly. “But he has one flaw as a manipulator, and that is, a really good manipulator doesn’t leave any traces of his manipulation. And Ira’s ego is such that he falls short of being a master manipulator, because ultimately he wants you to know that he has manipulated.” “I haven’t the slightest interest in responding to this sort of juvenile name-calling,” says Glasser. “It indicates only the intellectual vacuity of his position.”

Many of Romero’s leading defenders–including Ramona Ripston, longtime executive director of the ACLU’s Southern California affiliate–regret that the dissidents did not keep their differences within the ACLU family. Indeed, Ripston believes that Glasser could have successfully run for the board in the early days of Romero’s tenure and done much good as an internal dissenter. Glasser bristles at the suggestion that the critics have shown disloyalty in taking their fight to the press and to the public. “The critics,” he says, “couldn’t even maintain themselves on the [national] board, much less get new people on the board.” In Glasser’s view, the “board is basically a self-perpetuating body and always has been…. Insurgency is close to a political impossibility if the leadership is opposed.” Vivian Berger takes a sledgehammer to that argument: “If Ira can’t get to the New York electors, then I can’t find my way to the subway. What I think the critics are quarreling with is democratic governance. They have not impressed enough people to get elected.”

Now that the most vocal critics are off the board, the dissidents seem to be focusing their efforts on the ACLU’s fifty-three state affiliates. Says Glasser, “I would like to see every affiliate have a full and fair discussion of the controversy on the merits, with the assumption that they don’t know which side is right, because both sides contain bona fide ACLU loyalists.” That road won’t be easy for the dissidents. Historically, the large affiliates have exercised tremendous clout within the ACLU, and those affiliates–Northern and Southern California, Washington, Massachusetts, Florida–are solidly behind Romero in the current dispute. Only the small, troubled affiliate in South Carolina has signed the petition on savetheaclu.org calling for the removal of the current leadership.

Indeed, it’s at the affiliate level that Romero may have decisively outmaneuvered his opponents. One of his primary goals has been to strengthen those affiliates. In 2001 the national office provided them with $6.5 million; in 2007 it will provide $31 million. Most of the affiliates seem extremely satisfied with the current arrangement. Voicesfortheaclu.org contains a letter of support for Romero signed by eighteen long-term affiliate directors, who affirmed, “Our organization has never been better organized, better professionally managed and better focused on its principles than at this moment in our 86-year history.”

At the strategic level, perhaps the dissidents’ greatest failure was their inability to bring the heavyweight Northern and Southern California affiliates into the rebel camp. Historically, those affiliates have been among the most radical, innovative and principled in the ACLU universe. But, then again, the leading dissenters are still endeavoring to persuade some of their own friends that their course of action is the proper one. Says one person close to Glasser, “Ira is absolutely right on the merits of his case, but wrong in the way he is going about it.”

Beginning in 2004, the critics performed a useful service by confronting Romero and bringing his transgressions to light. Indeed, Romero should hasten to answer any remaining questions from past controversies. Some of his own supporters, for instance, would welcome a fuller account of the “rights and responsibilities” fiasco. But the dissidents had their day in court. The appropriate venue for opposing the executive director of the ACLU is the national board of the ACLU, to which the critics have previously (and exhaustively) directed their energies. However unacceptable it may be to Glasser & Co., the board has spoken–in favor of Romero. In an ideal world, Glasser would now be serving as the ACLU’s roving ambassador-at-large–lecturing, debating, igniting the airwaves with his rhetorical virtuosity. It’s probably too late for him to play that role; but it’s not too late for him to repair his reputation by curtailing his efforts to undermine his handpicked successor.

Romero says he intends to persevere in the face of ongoing criticism. But his supporters believe it won’t be easy. “Ira is the best streetfighter I’ve ever known,” says Ramona Ripston. What happens next, according to Aryeh Neier, is largely up to Romero. “I don’t believe that his opponents have the momentum to be able to engineer Anthony’s overthrow,” says Neier. “It’s simply a question of how much he can put up with. And if he decides that he can put up with it, and that he intends to prevail, I think he will prevail.”

In January 2003 John Brady Kiesling, political counselor at the US Embassy in Greece, hosted a dinner party for a dozen European artists and intellectuals at his apartment in Athens. Most of the guests were friendly to the United States, but none of them could fathom the Bush Administration’s inexorable march to war in Iraq. As a career diplomat obligated to defend his country’s foreign policy, Kiesling reflexively counterattacked with prowar arguments, but the rhetorical effort left him exhausted and irritable. “At the end of the evening,” he later explained, “I realized how threadbare and unconvincing my arguments had been. And these were people who like Americans!”

A few weeks later Kiesling resigned from the State Department. “Our fervent pursuit of war with Iraq,” he wrote in an eloquent letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell, “is driving us to squander the international legitimacy that has been America’s most potent weapon of both offense and defense since the days of Woodrow Wilson.” That letter turned Kiesling into an antiwar celebrity and brought him an admiring handwritten note from Bill Clinton.

“My personality,” Kiesling says with a wan smile, “is not really that suited to going out and being a rock star.” That’s true: He has none of the swagger and charisma we tend to associate with whistleblowers and mavericks like Daniel Ellsberg and Joseph Wilson. With his light blue button-down shirt, khaki pants, black loafers and round glasses, Kiesling, youthful at 49, carries himself like an assistant professor of English or an earnest young librarian. One senses a steeliness in him, but also a sense of fragility. Did he make the correct decision to terminate his twenty-year career in the foreign service? “Yes, I’m much happier now,” he responds without hesitation. “Everyone has to punch some ticket in life that says they have made a difference.”

Kiesling was recently in New York City to promote his new book, Diplomacy Lessons, and I met him at an apartment across from Washington Square Park, where he was staying with an old friend. Diplomacy Lessons is three things: an autopsy of the Bush Administration’s foreign policy by a man whose job was to help implement it; a primer on the art (and necessity) of first-rate diplomacy in an era of unilateral gunslinging; and a memoir of Kiesling’s years as a foreign service officer in Israel, Armenia, Morocco and Greece, the country he loves the most and the place he now calls home. The pages devoted to Kiesling’s career are among the most gripping in the book.

In those pages, we see an idealistic young man, with a newly minted graduate degree from Berkeley in Mediterranean archeology and ancient history, who took the foreign service exam in 1983. We see a hapless diplomat in Morocco who, with the best of intentions, once tried to broker a deal between a restless neighbor (a proud, impoverished Islamic university student) and a US intelligence officer, a deal that quickly collapsed. We see him gaining confidence as a junior diplomat: schmoozing with power brokers and literati, scanning the Greek press for political minutiae and making the long drive every few months to the headquarters of the Communist Party of Greece, where, near a huge bust of Lenin, he would spend an hour arguing with the Politburo member in charge of international relations.

And finally we witness his growing disillusionment with US diplomacy after 9/11 and the ways those sentiments expanded his political consciousness and drove him to despair. Strolling through the old quarter of Ankara in the weeks after the US assault on Falluja, Kiesling saw signs in tourist shops that read “Americans Not Welcome.” In light of these and other incidents, some old shibboleths in his mind began to crumble. In 2001 he smugly assured the publisher of a left-wing newspaper in Athens that Noam Chomsky was “clinically insane.” Writes Kiesling in his new book, “I feel more charitably disposed toward Chomsky now.”

It wasn’t principle alone that inspired Kiesling’s act of rebellion. Diplomacy Lessons chronicles the administrative and bureaucratic imbroglios that preceded his decision to resign. It’s a tangled and psychologically complex story. In 2002 Kiesling ran into difficulty with the diplomatic security division of the Embassy in Athens, which routinely sends young Marines to offices after hours in search of unsecured classified material. If an unsecured document is located, a pink slip is deposited. Kiesling’s pink slips began to proliferate, and he was informed that he was ineligible for promotion for one year. “Almost certainly,” he writes, “the lapses were my fault, the result of working too late with too little sleep.” But he also felt he was being punished arbitrarily. “Every political officer who actually does any work runs afoul of this system once or twice,” he says now. When he sought the support of his Ambassador, Thomas Miller, and was rebuffed, Kiesling felt he no longer had “absolute faith in the integrity of the system I worked for.” His anger toward Miller, combined with the queasiness he felt about the imminent war in Iraq, gave him the courage to resign, he says.

Doing so meant sacrificing a steady career. With his savings depleted, he is scrambling to build a new life for himself, writing for an English-language Athens newspaper and researching a book about the November 17 organization–a “little tiny terrorist group,” he relates, “that for twenty-five years tied the US government in knots in Greece.” Eventually he would like to support himself as a freelance writer in Greece, where he says the cost of living is less than in the United States and where he appears to be held in high esteem, but his anxiety about the future is palpable.

Kiesling may have lost faith in the Bush-era State Department, but he remains idealistic about the diplomatic profession. His book is dedicated to “the new generation of the US Foreign Service, whose faith in their country and curiosity about the planet will bring new pride to a proud profession.” Already he’s in contact with that new generation. “I recruited a couple of potential new foreign service officers on my book tour these last few days,” explains Kiesling. “A really bright guy working on War News Radio at Swarthmore College now says he wants to take the foreign service exam and he e-mailed me on how to do it.”

Last December Gabriel Schoenfeld, senior editor of Commentary, sat down to review James Risen’s book State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, a portion of which had just appeared, to much acclaim and controversy, on page one of the New York Times and would later garner Risen and Eric Lichtblau a Pulitzer Prize. As he read the book Schoenfeld wondered, “Is it legal to publish this kind of stuff?” Risen’s explosive revelations about the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program enraged Schoenfeld, who decided to abandon his review and embark instead on a more ambitious essay about espionage and leaks. In recent months that essay–“Has The New York Times Violated the Espionage Act?,” which appeared in the March issue of Commentary–has taken on a life of its own and has brought its author a certain degree of fame and notoriety. His influence may expand as the Times and other newspapers endure Republican fury and calls for prosecution as a result of their June 22 decision to publish a story revealing a secret government financial tracking program.

In his research into the 1917 Espionage Act and subsequent espionage statutes, Schoenfeld discovered Section 798 of the US Criminal Code, enacted by Congress in 1950, which reads, “Whoever knowingly and willingly communicates, furnishes, transmits or otherwise makes available to an unauthorized person, or publishes…any classified information…concerning the communication intelligence activities of the United States…shall be fined not more than $10,000 or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.” (His italics.) This, Schoenfeld believed, was the “completely unambiguous” smoking gun he needed against Risen and the Times–both of whom, he felt, had “damaged critical intelligence capabilities” and undermined national security with the NSA story. Schoenfeld knew when he wrote the essay that no journalist had ever been prosecuted under Section 798, but his purpose was to stiffen the spine of the Justice Department. “The laws governing what the Times has done are perfectly clear,” he concluded. “Will they be enforced?”

Schoenfeld’s essay caught the eye of a producer at The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer, who invited him on the show on April 25. “The rest is history,” Schoenfeld says. He was subsequently invited to testify twice before Congress: In May and June he appeared before the House Intelligence Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he more or less summarized the Commentary essay. Schoenfeld, who has written half a dozen pieces for the Times since 1990, also appeared on MSNBC’s The Abrams Report and was granted space on the op-ed page of the Los Angeles Times.

Some press critics were quick to contest Schoenfeld’s arguments. Writing in Slate, Jack Shafer noted that under the logic employed by Commentary, many leading national security reporters could be prosecuted under Section 798, including Bill Gertz of the Washington Times (for a 2000 story titled “Russian Merchant Ships Used in Spying” that relied on CIA and NSA documents), James Bamford (for a 2006 story in The Atlantic on the successful efforts of the NSA to target Islamic militants in Yemen), Bob Woodward (for divulging in his book Plan of Attack that Iraq had “the kind of old-line Soviet coding equipment that NSA knew well and could crack”) and Seymour Hersh (who drew heavily on NSA documents for a 2001 story in The New Yorker on the machinations of the Saudi royal family). Shafer cited a dozen other reporters who could conceivably be jailed, including Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard.

Other Schoenfeld critics leaped into the fray with a series of letters that appear in the June Commentary. In one letter Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists takes aim at the sweeping nature of the law and notes that he recently obtained a historical document regarding the NSA budget for 1972–a figure that remains classified. “Should I therefore be prosecuted? Should Commentary be penalized for publishing the information in this letter? That would be absurd.” “My view,” proclaims Morton Halperin of the Open Society Institute in another letter, is that the Times “may have violated a criminal statute but that its conduct was far from shameful.” Thunders Ohio University professor Joe Bernt: “If letting the public know that we have a law-violating President who needs to be impeached violates the law, I only hope the New York Times continues to violate the laws of tyrants.”

Is the Times vulnerable to prosecution? On May 21 US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales declared that there is “a possibility” that journalists can be prosecuted for publishing classified information. Most experts doubt that the government would attempt such a maneuver. Says Geoffrey Stone, professor of law at the University of Chicago and author of Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime, “The fact is that the US government, in 215 years, has never once prosecuted the press for publishing government secrets.” In Stone’s view the 1950 law is “clearly unconstitutional. It includes no reference whatever to clear and present danger or any other level of harm to the national security.”

Others agree. “While in theory the Times might be vulnerable,” notes Boston defense attorney Harvey Silverglate, “there are arguable defenses. And besides, where is the Department of Justice going to get a twelve-citizen jury to unanimously buy the government’s view that the Times is a criminal but the Bush Administration is not?” Schoenfeld says he cannot imagine a government prosecution: “Before my essay came out, I would say the chance was zero percent. After the article came out, the odds have risen to .05 percent.” Then what did he achieve with the essay? “I hope,” he says, “that I set in motion a ‘chilling effect,’ however slight, when it comes to the publication of sensitive and highly classified counterterrorism programs, the illegal disclosure of which may make it easier for radical Islamists to strike us again.”

In recent months Schoenfeld’s essay certainly appears to have provided intellectual ammunition for those who would censor and punish the press. His arguments have already been reproduced in the Wall Street Journal, National Review and The New Criterion; by Accuracy in Media; and by pundits like Michael Barone. Fortunately, some top newspaper editors seem to be waking up to the dangers. “I’m not sure journalists fully appreciate the threat confronting us,” Times executive editor Bill Keller recently told National Journal, citing “the Times in the eavesdropping case, the Post for its CIA prison stories and everyone else who has tried to look behind the ‘war on terror.'”

Critics of the Times will no doubt brandish the Schoenfeld essay in their current offensive against the paper for printing the Swift database story, also by Risen and Lichtblau. What are Keller’s thoughts on the piece? “I like to think the American electorate,” Keller told The Nation before the Swift controversy erupted, “would not look kindly on the federal government seeking to lock up journalists as spies. Even if you accept at face value the polls on media credibility, I think Americans are proud of having a free press and would find an espionage prosecution to be a chilling governmental overreach.”

New York City

Scott Sherman, in “Target Ford” [June 5], quotes several people who theorize about why the Ford Foundation changed its grant letter in 2003. As surprising as it may seem, the truth is simple and straightforward. We were disgusted by the vicious anti-Semitic activity at the United Nations Conference on Racism, at Durban. While Ford grantees were not responsible for the worst of this activity, the behavior and language of a few was disturbing and unacceptable to us. In response, we took a range of actions, including cessation of funding.

The language that we subsequently added to our grant letter is an explicit expression of our values–values that were implicit in our grant-making but which, after Durban, clearly needed to be explicitly articulated. Our letter has prompted useful conversations in some of the complex regions in which we work. Our values remain clear: We will not fund those who promote or engage in violence, terrorism, bigotry or the destruction of any state.

To date, only a handful of organizations have chosen not to sign our letter. Since 2004, when we revised the grant letter, approximately 4,500 have been signed by grantees who are moving forward with their work. All of the universities Sherman mentions have either signed or now applied for funds.

We continue to work in many trouble spots around the world, always seeking to promote civil society, human rights and achievement, and peaceful solutions to conflict. To suggest, as Sherman does, that the foundation has backed away from these ambitions ignores our funding for the courageous individuals and institutions worldwide who invest their energy and their faith in our shared values.

MARTA L. TELLADO
Vice president for communications,
The Ford Foundation

Washington, DC

Scott Sherman presents a very distorted picture of my actions vis-à-vis the Ford Foundation’s efforts to develop a policy reflecting its commitment to progressive philanthropy and against racism. Because of my work to protect civil liberties, including leading House opposition to the Patriot Act and warrantless wiretapping, I have at times been accused of being soft on terrorism. Being accused of promoting censorship of progressive scholarship and advocacy is, however, a first. It is also untrue.

The policy that the Ford Foundation ultimately adopted requires that grant recipients not “promote or engage in violence, terrorism, bigotry or the destruction of any state.” When did it become inappropriate for a private foundation, especially one with Ford’s progressive track record, to refuse to fund those activities?

The government must be neutral toward different points of view. Private foundations, however, need not be. They exist to advance their own values. Sherman approvingly notes Ford’s “commitment to human rights, poverty reduction and racial justice” and that in response to right-wing attacks, it “defiantly stepped up its funding of a wide range of antipoverty and social justice groups.” Yet he seems to suggest that Ford’s historic commitment to these values should not extend to combating anti-Semitism in the same way it has to combating racism, homophobia or other forms of bigotry. Thankfully, Ford has taken a different view.

Sherman’s prediction that Ford would use its new grant language to limit free expression in some way other than by not subsidizing “violence, terrorism, bigotry or the destruction of any state” would be troubling if it had actually happened. In fact, Sherman was unable to cite a single case in which this has occurred.

In addition, Sherman strangely dismisses my concern that Ford and other foundations were at risk of hostile action by right-wing members of Congress. This was no idle threat. Conservatives have spent years attacking foundations, the arts, scholars, scientists and any other independent voice that might run afoul of their agenda. These battles have been chronicled in the pages of this publication and indeed in Sherman’s article on Ford.

Make no mistake about it. In this particular case, some Senate Republicans saw a “perfect storm” gathering right before the 2004 election: a chance to work over the largest US progressive foundation and to exploit the issue to curry favor with Jewish voters. Senators Santorum and Grassley had already announced their desire to hold public hearings to begin the onslaught. By addressing the problem of bigotry among a small group of grantees, Ford both rededicated itself to its progressive mission and cut off the right-wing attack before it got off the ground.

Progressive foundations betray their mission when they support activities that promote violence, bigotry and terrorism. It is not just their right but their duty to insure that their funds go to organizations and initiatives that promote progressive values. Bigots are assured a steady stream of funding from the far right. They neither need nor deserve the support of the progressive community.

JERROLD NADLER
Member of Congress, Eighth District, New York

Gloucester, Mass.

The Ford Foundation’s policy of refusing funds to any organization that promotes the destruction of a state raises a hornet’s nest of interesting questions: Will this hold true for an Ethiopian relief organization whose members advocate the reconquest of Eritrea, which won its independence from them only fifteen years ago? Would this have applied to any Eritrean organization before 1991 that advocated the former colony’s independence then? What about grantees who advocated the dismantling of the Soviet Union? Or the former Yugoslavia? What about those that support independence for Quebec? Or Kurdistan?

Or are we really only talking about Israel?

DAN CONNELL

SHERMAN REPLIES

Brooklyn, NY

Marta Tellado seems to be implying that since most Ford grantees have not openly resisted the grant language imposed in 2004, then the language must be acceptable to them. But as I noted in my piece, most grantees are not in a position to challenge Ford. A handful of groups who felt they could stand up to the foundation did so.

It’s true enough that certain Republicans have targeted liberal foundations in the past. But Nadler’s account of the “perfect storm” of 2003 overlooks the fact that Senator Grassley is primarily interested in regulating–not “destroying”–the foundation sector. (“Destroy” is the word Nadler used during our interview.)

But the real issue here is the wording of Ford’s grant-agreement letter–beginning with the word “promote.” In one of their letters to Susan Berresford, Ethan Nadelmann and Ira Glasser of the Drug Policy Alliance noted that in recent years the government has “explicitly characterized the use of illicit drugs as promoting terrorism.” They added: “The trouble with such ill-defined standards as ‘promoting terrorism’ or ‘promoting bigotry’ or ‘promoting the destruction of any state’ is that they inevitably embrace advocacy and speech. The rights of those who advocate for unpopular ideas and proposals are then at the mercy and discretion of those who interpret and enforce such vague and overbroad restrictions.”

Similarly, with regard to the “destruction of any state” clause, this could have been interpreted, during the antiapartheid era, as prohibiting grants to groups affiliated with, or supporting, the African National Congress. Dan Connell cites a number of other examples. The university provosts wielded similar arguments against the Ford Foundation.

SCOTT SHERMAN

On October 16, 2003, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, a New York-based wire service that serves Jewish newspapers worldwide, launched a scorching four-part series on the Ford Foundation. Written by investigative reporter Edwin Black, the series, “Funding Hate,” alleged that Ford had provided financial support to several Palestinian nongovernmental organizations accused of anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic behavior at the United Nations World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa, in late summer 2001. A Ford spokesman denied the thrust of Black’s allegations: “We have seen no indication that our grantees in Durban or elsewhere engaged in anti-Semitic speech or activities.”

One month later, after a political onslaught from members of Congress and some prominent Jewish organizations, Ford reversed itself. In a letter to Jerrold Nadler, a Democratic Congressman from Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Susan Berresford, the president of Ford, declared that her institution was “disgusted by the vicious anti-Semitic activity seen at Durban” and that “having reassessed our own information on the Durban Conference…we now recognize that we did not have a complete picture of the activities, organizations and people involved…. We deeply regret that Foundation grantees may have taken part in unacceptable behavior.” Berresford reiterated those sentiments in a letter to the Wall Street Journal, which had published an editorial extolling the JTA series, lashing Ford and, sounding an old conservative refrain, lamenting the existence of “a foundation priesthood funded into perpetuity and insulated from public accountability.”

To some extent, the 2003 attack on Ford–the worst crisis to hit the foundation since 1969–could be regarded as an example of the increased political scrutiny that US nonprofits have faced since 9/11. Under Presidential Executive Order 13224, enacted in late September 2001, the government obtained broad new power to freeze the assets of any US foundation or charitable organization that is deemed to have provided financial or humanitarian support to “terrorist” organizations. Moreover, the government has encouraged grant-makers and nonprofits to regularly consult a series of computerized terror watch lists maintained by various federal and international agencies–watch lists that are full of dubious aliases, generic names and “false positive” matches. The vague, sweeping language surrounding these regulations and the ways they have put new burdens on charities and foundations have provoked considerable anxiety and confusion throughout the nonprofit sector.

The offensive against Ford, however, has deeper roots. It was a brazen attempt to punish a foundation that since the 1950s has disbursed more than $13 billion to more than 13,000 educational, environmental, human rights, social justice and other organizations in the United States and abroad. Under enormous pressure, and fearful that the accusations might trigger increased government oversight of the entire US foundation sector, Ford made a series of concessions to its critics. One of them–a pledge to alter the language in its standard grant-agreement letter, a decision that has powerful civil liberties implications–has left some of the foundation’s traditional allies simmering with displeasure and unease. “Historically, Ford’s best quality has been its willingness to take some risks and fund some controversial things,” says Pablo Eisenberg, a senior fellow at Georgetown’s Public Policy Institute and a columnist for The Chronicle of Philanthropy. “But I think Berresford and Ford caved in unnecessarily to Nadler.” Many people in the foundation world agree with Eisenberg, but few will say so publicly.

Two weeks before 9/11, 18,000 people from more than 160 countries descended on Durban for the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance. Racial and caste discrimination, along with the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism, were at the top of the agenda, and the conference attempted to build common ground among a very wide range of groups, from the Roma to Australia’s Aborigines to Argentina’s and Chile’s Mapuche Indians. There were some notable successes at Durban–the large Dalit contingent embarrassed the Indian government by drawing attention to the plight of India’s 160 million “untouchables,” and the human rights of migrants received international recognition–but the conference became mired in controversy over Israel and Palestine.

Some organizations at Durban complained bitterly about anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic rhetoric and behavior. Commentary described pamphlets featuring “hooknosed Jews grinning over the blood-soaked bodies of Palestinians” and leaflets that expressed admiration for Hitler. At a press conference held at Durban and sponsored by the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, Michael Posner, executive director of the Lawyers Committee, declared: “Anti-Semitic sentiments expressed at the conference are repugnant and reprehensible.” Supporters of Israel were especially infuriated by the final text of the official NGO declaration, a controversial document that blamed Israel for “acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing”; demanded the dismantling of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories; and called for the imposition of a “policy of complete and total isolation of Israel as an apartheid state.”

In the wake of Durban, Black noted, Jewish organizational leaders singled out one Palestinian NGO–the Palestinian Committee for the Protection of Human Rights and the Environment (LAW)–for much of the anti-Israel agitation at the conference. In his series Black alleged that LAW staffers occupied leadership positions on key steering committees; conducted workshops at which Israel was pilloried; and gave South African delegates a preconference tour of Gaza and the West Bank to highlight the similarities between apartheid and the Israeli occupation. LAW, Black noted, was a Ford grantee–having received $1.1 million since 1997. (Another group at Durban, the Palestinian NGO Network, which had received more than $1.4 million from Ford, was also targeted by pro-Israel forces.) Black’s stark, tendentious series had one principal objective: to tar the Ford Foundation with the brush of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. One might have expected Ford to respond energetically to accusations of this sort, but at no point did the foundation provide a detailed public rebuttal to the allegations in Black’s series–allegations that still hang in the air. This past April the Detroit News proclaimed that Ford has a “reputation for backing causes tied to terrorism and anti-Semitism.” More than two years later, Ford is still very reluctant to confront Black’s reporting. Spokesperson Marta Tellado will only say this: “We did not, and do not today, believe that he accurately portrayed our grant-making.”

The reporting by Black–a blustery muckraker who has written extensively about the Holocaust and Zionism–was not limited to the events at Durban; it was also a deeper assault on Ford’s grant-making. Black obtained a sixty-page audit of LAW by the accounting firm Ernst & Young that had been commissioned by some of LAW’s thirty or so European and American donors–many of which, like Ford, had developed deep concerns about LAW’s fiduciary practices. According to Black, the audit showed that LAW had mismanaged several million dollars. Today LAW no longer exists, and none of its former executives could be located.

Black’s series had powerful reverberations. A few days after it concluded, the American Jewish Congress called on lawmakers in Washington to examine the tax-exempt status of foundations like Ford–on the grounds that Ford, through its Palestinian grantees, may have financed “terrorists and terror-related activities.” Shortly thereafter Berresford received a letter from Representative Nadler and nineteen members of Congress demanding that Ford “investigate these allegations fully and expeditiously.” On November 13, 2003, Senator Rick Santorum also requested a formal investigation of Ford, and Senator Charles Grassley, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, expressed his concerns about the allegations directed at the foundation.

Ford’s critics included two of the most powerful members of the American Jewish establishment: Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League and Malcolm Hoenlein of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Also critical were New Republic editor in chief (and Jewish Telegraphic Agency board member) Martin Peretz, who insisted that Ford “wanted to squeeze Israel, and they allied themselves with despicable people to do so”; the New York Sun, which printed the JTA series and subsequently asked for Berresford’s resignation in an editorial; and David Horowitz’s FrontPage Magazine. A month after Black’s series, the JTA reported that Ford “seems to be in disarray over its next move.”

On November 17, 2003, Ford issued its response to Nadler: a detailed and deferential letter in which Berresford announced that Ford had decided to stop funding LAW; that it had “engaged the international accounting firm KPMG to create a risk matrix” to establish which Ford grantees will be audited; and that the foundation would soon turn its attention and resources to the “alarming rise of anti-Semitism around the world.”

Perhaps most significant, Berresford announced that Ford’s standard grant-agreement letter would be overhauled. Seven weeks later, Ford unveiled the new language in a brief memo to its 5,000 grantees: “By countersigning this grant letter, you agree that your organization will not promote or engage in violence, terrorism, bigotry or the destruction of any state, nor will it make sub-grants to any entity that engages in these activities.” Moreover, the prohibition “applies to all of the organization’s funds, not just those provided through a grant from Ford.” [Emphasis added.] Georgetown’s Pablo Eisenberg, a singular maverick in the tight-lipped foundation world, calls this a “most unusual” and “excessive” stipulation. Says Eisenberg, “Who is Ford to say what an organization can do with Soros money, for example?”

Berresford’s announcement triggered indignation and dismay from some Ford staffers who felt she had capitulated to outside critics by instituting grant language that is vague and open-ended, on the one hand, yet unmistakably direct in its unstated reference to Israel, on the other. “Susan is very tough and principled,” a former Ford staffer says, “so they must have really twisted her arm to get her to put in that new grant language.” Other foundation executives share that dismay. Says one: “This is the kind of language that, had it been from the government, the ACLU would have to sue.” (Ford is not the only private foundation whose grant language has been criticized. The Rockefeller Foundation’s language, while less problematic, was also debated, as was the language of other foundations.)

In a ten-minute phone interview that Berresford granted to The Nation, she defended her decision to alter Ford’s grant letter and denied it was done under duress. “We wanted to make very explicit and clear what our values were,” Berresford said. “We don’t want to support organizations that promote or engage in violence, terrorism, bigotry or the destruction of any state. Those are our values. I think that’s what the public expects of us. I’m very proud to state those values clearly.”

Nadler hailed the agreement with Ford as a “critical new chapter in the fight against anti-Semitism and the delegitimization of Israel’s right to exist.” But other critics in Congress remained dissatisfied with Ford’s written response to Nadler: Santorum and Grassley expressed their desire to push ahead with hearings about the practices of American foundations, and the Wall Street Journal urged them to proceed with such an inquiry. Nadler’s own allies were somewhat divided about what to do next: Some Jewish leaders wanted a full Congressional investigation, while Abraham Foxman of the ADL declared himself against hearings. Nadler, for his part, feared that an investigation could unfairly target liberal foundations. A JTA story from early 2004 bluntly outlined some of the potential hazards of applying excessive pressure on the Ford Foundation: “Certainly, there are things for the Jewish community to gain from good relations with a foundation as big as Ford.” Foxman himself informed the JTA: “At the end of the day, I assume they will fund some project submitted to them by a mainstream Jewish organization.”

“The Ford Foundation,” Dwight Macdonald wrote in 1956, “is a large body of money completely surrounded by people who want some.” Established in Michigan in 1936 by Edsel Ford, the foundation formally separated itself from Ford family control in 1950. (Over the past year, Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox, a Republican, has waged a bare-knuckled offensive to pressure Ford to increase its spending in the state where it was chartered.) In 1955 the foundation made a decision to sell 10 million shares of auto company stock, for which it received $641 million, the bulk of which it promptly distributed to 600 colleges and universities, 3,500 nonprofit hospitals and 44 medical schools. In the 1950s and early ’60s Ford provided substantial funding for burgeoning area studies research at leading universities and for ambitious international projects involving population control and agricultural production in the developing world. Ford had close ties to the government in those years; according to The Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders, Ford collaborated with the CIA.

Amid the political turbulence of the 1960s and ’70s, Ford, under the leadership of McGeorge Bundy, deepened its commitment to human rights, poverty reduction and racial justice. It gave major grants to the NAACP and helped to establish the Public Broadcasting Service, the National Council of La Raza, the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the Urban Institute, the Native American Rights Fund and public-interest law centers in the United States, to name just a few of its grantees from that heady era. Today, from its headquarters on East 43rd Street, which rises from a lush atrium and is decorated with works by Picasso and Chagall, Ford, the second-largest foundation in the United States, with assets of $11.6 billion, remains ambitious in its grant-making: In 2004 it gave away nearly $500 million to 2,000 grantees, ranging from the Steve Biko Foundation of South Africa ($150,000 for activities commemorating the life and work of Biko) to the Navsarjan Trust of India ($200,000 to support the human rights of Dalits in the violence-prone state of Gujarat) and the Apollo Theater Foundation of Harlem ($250,000 to help restore the historic theater).

Right-wing assaults have been a recurring motif in Ford’s history. Westbrook Pegler, the midcentury syndicated columnist, dubbed Ford a “front for dangerous communists,” and in the early 1950s Ford was the subject of two separate Congressional investigations into subversive and Communist-influenced activity among foundations.

In 1969 critics of the foundation sector exacted their revenge. In the tumultuous days after Robert Kennedy’s assassination in 1968, Bundy had arranged fellowships totaling $131,000 for eight members of Kennedy’s staff. The following year, the House Ways and Means Committee opened hearings on the activities of American foundations, and Bundy was a star witness. He vigorously defended Ford and the entire foundation sector, but his arrogance infuriated his Congressional antagonists, who went on to enact legislation forcing all private foundations to pay a 4 percent excise tax on net annual investment income and to distribute 6 percent of their assets each year. The 1969 legislation was viewed as draconian by a foundation sector that–then as now–opposed any type of government oversight. Indeed, many foundation leaders held Bundy personally responsible for what they saw as a debacle; but other observers viewed the 1969 legislation as an essential step toward public accountability.

Ford watchers insist that the trauma of 1969 remains, to this day, embedded in the DNA of top Ford executives. (Berresford began her career at Ford in 1970, when she was 27, and worked her way to the top.) “Ford lives with the legacy that Bundy’s arrogance cost the field,” says Emmett Carson, president of the Minneapolis Foundation and a leading figure in the philanthropic sector. Meanwhile, prominent conservatives maintained a keen interest in the foundation. “The Ford Foundation,” presidential aide Patrick Buchanan wrote in a memo to Richard Nixon in 1972, “has become the Exchequer and Command Post for the entire American Left.” Buchanan had fantasies of his own. Attempts to expose Ford’s ties to liberal organizations might well, he suggested to Nixon, “produce a cornucopia of Ford funds for Republican and Conservative causes–to spare Ford from being taken apart by the Congress at some future tax reform hearings.”

Historically, criticism of foundations has not been the exclusive province of the right. The principal critic of the sector in the 1960s, Representative Wright Patman of Texas, was a Democrat. Likewise, in 2003 Ford’s primary antagonist was Jerrold Nadler, a stalwart progressive who is also a powerful supporter of Israel. In a recent interview Nadler noted that antifoundation sentiment was rising within the Senate Finance Committee in 2003, and especially among Grassley and Santorum. To some extent, that sentiment flowed from newspaper reports about lavish salaries and perks for foundation executives. Black’s series thrust the foundation sector under a harsh glare once again. In Nadler’s words, a “well-orchestrated campaign to destroy the sector…a Republican jihad” was gathering force, and it became his duty to discipline the Ford Foundation in order to save it. “My principal concern,” Nadler says, “was with the anti-Semitism that was being tolerated by some of these nonprofits on the left. And I didn’t want this to be used as a weapon with which to destroy very essential institutions like the Ford Foundation.” (Nadler boasts that his maneuvering was successful: Santorum and Grassley never held the promised hearings because “we cut the ground out from under them.”) Some foundation experts contend that Nadler overstates the extent to which the sector was under siege by Republicans in 2003 and that he conflates “destruction” with regulation. Says Pablo Eisenberg, “I never heard anything about any ‘jihad,’ or that they had a vengeance against foundations.”

Nadler’s office worked closely with Ford to draft the new grant language. Berresford declined to elaborate on the specific ways the new language was formulated, and the full extent to which outside parties contributed to the final text. But it was clearly a collaborative effort. Says Nadler: “It was a back-and-forth negotiation between my office and Ford and some of the Jewish groups.” In late 2003 the Forward named the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League as groups that were deeply involved in the Ford negotiations. Berresford insists that the grant language was “not forced on us in any way, shape, or form.”

Ford’s grantees, many of whom are dependent on the foundation’s largesse, were hardly in a position to contest the new grant language. But a handful of grantees did resist–beginning with the nation’s top universities. On April 27, 2004, Ford received a letter signed by nine university provosts, from Princeton, Columbia, Stanford, Harvard, the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, MIT, Yale and Cornell. These are some of Ford’s most distinguished grantees, with whom it has a lengthy history. In 1965, for instance, Harvard established its John F. Kennedy Institute of Politics with a $2 million Ford grant.

In their letter, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, the provosts expressed their “serious concerns” about the new language, on the grounds that it attempts to “regulate universities’ behavior and speech beyond the scope of the grant.” “It is difficult to see,” they wrote, “how this clause would not run up against the basic principle of protected speech on our campuses.” For instance, if Columbia University, a major Ford grantee, were to sponsor a Palestinian film festival–as it did in 2003–all of Columbia’s Ford grants could theoretically be jeopardized if a film in that series was deemed to be supportive of “violence, terrorism, bigotry or the destruction of any state.” Pro-Israel critics at Columbia assailed the film festival on those very grounds.

In mid-2004 Ford responded to the provosts with a “side letter” affirming that the foundation had no desire to interfere with the speech “in classrooms, faculty publications, student remarks in chat rooms, or other speech that express the views of the individuals.” The grant letter, Ford insisted, applies only “to the official speech and conduct of the university and to speech or conduct that the university explicitly endorses.” The unity of the nine universities collapsed when Harvard accepted Ford’s side letter in the summer of 2004. (Harvard’s provost, Steven Hyman, and its president, Lawrence Summers, declined to be interviewed.) Some people close to the negotiations between Ford and the provosts are convinced that if the nine elite universities had maintained their unity, they might, in the end, have pressured Ford to change the language. (In their letter, the provosts had offered a proposed revision that Ford found unacceptable.)

If Harvard was particularly eager to settle with Ford, Stanford held out the longest before reluctantly accepting the side letter in late 2004. But the issue remains somewhat controversial at Stanford. At a meeting of its academic council on January 20, 2005, Provost John Etchemendy informed the faculty about Ford’s “official speech…of the university” clause and declared, “Unfortunately they would not clarify exactly what that meant.” Etchemendy warned the faculty that Stanford’s administration could not protect their Ford grants. Today, Stanford administrators are quick to acknowledge that they are still concerned about the lack of clarity in the side letter and still unclear about the limits of the “official speech” clause. Does it cover the speech of professors? Does it cover Stanford University Press (which has a distinguished list in Middle East Studies)? Does it cover the Stanford alumni magazine? Says vice provost Stephanie Kalfayan: “Those are great questions. You should ask Ford.” Susan Berresford says, “This is something we worked out with the universities. The side letters are clear. I don’t see the value of going further into this.”

In 2004 one other Ford grantee, the Drug Policy Alliance, joined the elite universities in contesting Ford’s grant language. DPA is led by Ethan Nadelmann, executive director, and the tenacious Ira Glasser, DPA’s president and the former head of the ACLU. On June 18, 2004, Nadelmann and Glasser dispatched a blunt letter to Berresford: “We believe that on its face, the overbreadth and vagueness of your language sweeps within its ban speech and advocacy that are critical to our work.” They went on, as the provosts did, to request a minor revision in Ford’s grant language: “a simple, supplementary sentence making clear that the ban…does not extend to advocacy or speech, but only to lawless, violent or discriminatory conduct.” [Emphasis in original.] And they warned Berresford that an ominous precedent was being established:

The infamous blacklists of the 1950s were similarly imposed by the private sector (in response, as here, to pressure from government officials) and similarly implemented their restrictions through economic, not criminal, sanctions…. Today, everyone wonders how those blacklists got started, how they became so entrenched, why so few (except the victims) protested. This is how it begins: with restrictions on speech and advocacy that would be unconstitutional if the state imposed them, imposed instead by private sector funding, with the government lurking in the background.

In the end Ford and DPA could not agree, and in late 2004 DPA returned a $200,000 grant to the Ford Foundation. “Some of DPA’s supporters have told me that we should just take the money, regardless of the way the grant letter is worded,” Nadelmann wrote in a 2004 letter to his membership. “But this is a fight about fundamental principles from which we could not walk away.”

In late June 2004 DPA’s letters to Berresford were released to the ACLU national board, several of whose members had, six weeks earlier, scrutinized the Wall Street Journal article about Ford’s conflict with the elite universities and wondered why an ACLU spokesman quoted therein neglected to criticize Ford’s restrictions. Two gadflies on the ACLU board, Wendy Kaminer and Michael Meyers, immediately questioned executive director Anthony Romero’s decision in early 2004 to accept a grant from Ford, which had been a generous benefactor: Between 1999 and 2004, the ACLU Foundation received $17 million from Ford. Romero, who spent ten years as a high-ranking Ford executive, was soon forced to admit to his board that not only had he advised Ford on the new language but that he had urged the foundation to “just parrot back language in existing federal law”–i.e., the Patriot Act, which the ACLU was then contesting with considerable vigor. In October 2004 the ACLU refused several Ford grants, which totaled more than $1 million.

Today Romero is contrite about his 2003 advice to Ford. “I made a mistake,” he says. “I was too slow to understand the broader context. I didn’t connect the dots.” And he is blunt about his former employer: “Ford made a big mistake with the grant language,” Romero says. “I think it has created a pall over the foundation and its grantees. It has only emboldened its critics. And it has cast a shadow over the work of one of the most important foundations at a very critical time.”

Some ACLU board members wish that Romero had used whatever influence he had with Berresford, of whom he is something of a protégé, to forestall the new grant language. “Because he was consulted by Berresford privately, before the new grant restrictions were written in stone, Anthony had a unique opportunity to advise her how to prohibit grantees from engaging in activities related to terrorism without restricting or chilling their speech,” says Kaminer. “We can’t know if his advice would have been followed, but we do know that he squandered the opportunity to give it.” Kaminer adds: “The advocacy rights of all Ford grantees have been chilled. The censorious efforts of private groups angered by Ford’s funding policies–and the intimidation of Ford by elected officials enlisted by these groups–have been rewarded.”

Nadler denies that he coerced Ford, and says he has no misgivings about the foundation’s new grant language. He insists that Ford, as a private-sector institution with no constitutional obligations, can do as it wishes. “It’s not a restriction on speech,” Nadler says of the new language. “It’s an agreement not to engage in terrorism. It hasn’t restricted anybody’s speech.”

But some leading experts on philanthropy are much less sanguine than Nadler. “Nadler is certainly technically correct. The First Amendment is a limitation on government, not private, action,” says Princeton’s Stanley Katz, president emeritus of the American Council of Learned Societies. “So strictly speaking Ford cannot be criticized for violating a constitutional right. But Ford has set itself up as a liberal philanthropic foundation, and the issue is whether it is violating its own freedom-of-expression principles. I think it has, and I would be surprised if Susan Berresford and others there were not keenly conscious of a tension between what they felt forced to do and what they truly believe in. Ford would not fund a private organization it knew to be systematically violating the freedom of expression, and it ought not to engage in such practices itself.”

” ‘Violence, terrorism, bigotry or the destruction of any state’ is very problematic” grant language, says Professor Michael Olivas of the University of Houston Law Center, who closely monitors the nonprofit sector. Olivas wonders why Ford included vague and open-ended terminology like “bigotry” in its grant letter when it could simply have stated that it will not fund any organization proscribed by the State Department.

Why did Ford agree to alter its grant language? Berresford is reticent on the subject, as is one Ford trustee who met with Nadler. But one reason behind Ford’s action may have been its desire to prevent additional government regulation of the foundation sector. In May 2003, five months before the JTA series, the sector–in which Berresford is very much a leader–was jolted by legislation proposed by Roy Blunt and Harold Ford Jr. that was designed to stimulate charitable giving. Federal law now requires foundations to pay out 5 percent of their assets annually, and the legislation would have required that the mandatory minimum payout exclude administrative costs such as rent and salaries–a provision that could have forced foundations to spend more money. The Ford Foundation (and the Council on Foundations, which represents 2,000 grant-makers) strenuously opposed the provision. Indeed, the foundation was involved in the sector’s decision to hire Bill Paxon, the former Republican Congressman, currently a lobbyist for Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, to represent its interests before Congress.

Some foundation experts insist that the foundation overreacted to what it saw as a higher payout requirement. According to Pablo Eisenberg, who advocates higher foundation payout rates, “Susan Berresford, whose Eleventh Commandment is ‘Thou Shalt Not Increase the Payout,'” privately argued that “this was an attack by the right wing to do away with liberal foundations like the Ford Foundation, which is total nonsense.”

The Congressional effort to exclude administrative costs was eventually beaten back by the foundations, but suspicion toward the sector lingered in the minds of some in Congress. And then Black’s series appeared in the JTA. People close to Berresford say that, faced with massive pressure from Nadler, Jewish organizations and newspapers like the New York Sun, she recalled the events of 1969 and the political price the entire sector could, once again, pay if Black’s series reignited the campaign for a higher payout or other regulatory measures.

It’s too early to determine how the events of 2003 have influenced Ford’s overall grant-making, and the possible extent to which program officers and trustees are distancing themselves from grantees that undertake controversial and politically risky work. What seems clear is that Ford has turned its attention to anti-Semitism, as it promised Nadler it would. And the foundation has done it in part by funding some of its chief antagonists from 2003. In 2004 Ford gave $361,000 to Abraham Foxman’s Anti-Defamation League for its World of Difference Institute, whose mission is to “combat racism, anti-Semitism and all forms of prejudice and bigotry,” followed by an additional $1.1 million in 2006 for the same project. (ADL’s last Ford grant was in 1967, and Foxman declined to be interviewed.) The American Jewish Committee received $400,000 in 2006, its first grant since 1998. David Harris, head of the AJC, did not return phone calls. In 2004 Ford also gave $625,000 to the Simon Wiesenthal Center–which chaired the delegation of Jewish organizations at Durban–to develop a tolerance and diversity training program for New York’s criminal justice community, the first grant the Wiesenthal Center has received from Ford.

ADL still has Ford under a microscope, and has heavily criticized recent actions by the foundation, including its decision to fund a conference on academic boycotts sponsored by the American Association of University Professors in Bellagio, Italy. The conference was eventually canceled.

“Large foundations,” Dwight Macdonald observed in 1956, “are timid beasts.” To compare Berresford’s response to the crisis of 2003 with McGeorge Bundy’s response to the events of 1969, when he was dragged before Congress, is to realize that Macdonald’s quip is largely but not completely accurate. In The Color of Truth, his fine biography of McGeorge and William Bundy, Kai Bird noted that in response to the political assault from conservative critics in 1969, Bundy “essentially refused to back off.” Under his direction, Ford defiantly stepped up its funding of a wide range of antipoverty and social justice groups. In his last annual report as president, in 1978, Bundy urged his colleagues at Ford not to “shy away from controversial activity.”

By instituting the new grant language in 2004, Berresford undoubtedly believed that she was acting in the best interests of both Ford and the foundation sector. Emmett Carson of the Minneapolis Foundation says that Ford may have seen the grant language as “a compromise they could live with.” Carson adds: “In hindsight, ten or twenty years from now, we may be prepared to say it was a very shrewd decision, a very modest compromise, at a time when the field lacked the voice, lacked the courage, lacked the sophistication to have the level of debate that was necessary.”

The historical evidence is beginning to accumulate, and not in a way that honors Ford. In one of their letters to Berresford, Nadelmann and Glasser wrote, “On the day the government decides to use your restriction as a precedent and model for its own, it will be too late to say you’re sorry. Do not do this, Susan.” That day arrived on February 7, 2005, when the Justice Department approvingly (and repeatedly) cited Ford’s new grant language–along with the grant language of the Rockefeller and Charles Stewart Mott foundations–in its motion to dismiss in American Civil Liberties Union Foundation, et al. v. Office of Personnel Management, et al.

In 2004 the ACLU and a dozen other organizations sued the OPM, a government agency, to prevent it from forcing nonprofits to certify that they do “not knowingly employ individuals or contribute funds to organizations” on terrorist watch lists before receiving any of the $250 million donated annually through the Combined Federal Campaign, which allows federal employees to allocate funds to various charities and nonprofits. Berresford’s response to the Justice Department’s citation of Ford? “The government finds its own language to express its own standards and views,” she says, “and they’re free to do that in whatever way they see fit.” Wendy Kaminer of the ACLU laments the fact that “the Bush Administration has invoked Ford’s restrictions as a model for its own restrictions on US charities.”

In recent months, however, the Rockefeller Foundation has distanced itself from Ford. Rockefeller has changed its grant language for 2006 in a way that satisfies groups like the ACLU and in a way that is consistent with what the elite universities requested of Ford in 2004. Indeed, Rockefeller’s president, Judith Rodin, was the president of the University of Pennsylvania in 2004 when that institution challenged Ford. Susan Berresford insists she has no plans to alter Ford’s grant language. “Ford,” says Anthony Romero of the ACLU, “really stands alone at this point.”

New York City

Scott Sherman’s “Bitter Winter at NYU” [Jan. 9/16] is not only poor reporting, it is so one-sided as to be irresponsible. He paints New York University president John Sexton as the bad guy in ad hominem terms. With few exceptions, he quotes only those who support the strike and ignores important aspects of NYU’s November 28 statement on the strike. Sherman cites union estimates that from 150 to 200 graduate assistants are on strike but fails to mention that that is only about 10 percent of such students.

Sherman ignores the fact that the long missive he describes by quoting a local newspaper’s anti-NYU editorial as a “frighteningly blunt ultimatum” actually told striking graduate students that they would retain both their scholarships and their health coverage. It also indicated that those who refused to return to their teaching duties would not receive stipends for the spring semester. The stipends are $18,000 per year. I am not aware of any persons on strike who expect to continue receiving their salaries while they walk the picket lines. The strike is disrupting NYU, and it is doing great harm to students, who are not being taught, or tutored, or counseled by those who are on strike.

Sherman suggests that NYU backed out on the union agreement when the NLRB changed an earlier decision that graduate students were employees and entitled to organize. He ignores easily obtainable information that NYU’s decision not to agree to a new contract was based on continuing union violations of the provisions of the 2001 collective bargaining agreement providing that “decisions regarding who is taught, what is taught, how it is taught and who does the teaching involves academic judgment and shall be made at the sole discretion of the University.” UAW brought a series of grievances to arbitration that flew in the face of its commitment. They lost all these challenges, but each diverted time and attention away from other matters and, according to university officials, severely undermined confidence in the union’s noninterference commitment.

Nation readers, including this subscriber, are mainly pro-union and might well side with the graduate student strike after hearing all the facts. The Sherman article denied them these facts, thereby doing a disservice to Nation readers and to this publication.

DERRICK BELL
Visiting professor, NYU Law School

Newark, Dela.

As the voice of the higher education profession and leading advocate for the highest academic standards, the American Association of University Professors deplores the actions of the NYU administration in severing bargaining relations with its graduate student union and threatening draconian punishments for those graduate employees who remain on strike.

The administration claims that its decision was based in part on the premise that allowing teaching assistants to have bargaining rights jeopardizes the traditional roles of professor and student, because the TAs will be placed in an adversarial relationship with their faculty mentors. However, a clear majority of NYU faculty supports the TAs. The NYU chapter of AAUP has organized an initiative called Faculty Democracy to oppose the administration’s action. More than 200 faculty members are active participants in that effort and have declared their support for the graduate student employees’ decision to strike. It is both disingenuous and risible to assert that the mentoring relationship is harmed by good faith negotiations about salaries, benefits and access to fair grievance procedures.

It would appear that the decision to sever ties with the union was motivated by a cynical desire to exploit the graduate teaching assistants. GAs lecture, grade papers and monitor examinations–in other words, they perform the teaching duties of a professor. They may join AAUP with full voting rights and the right to hold office at every level of the organization. The AAUP’s “Statement on Graduate Students” asserts, in part, that “graduate student assistants, like other campus employees, should have the right to organize to bargain collectively” and “must not suffer retaliation from professors or administrators because of their activity relating to collective bargaining.”

We condemn the retaliatory actions taken by the NYU administration against the strikers, which have had a chilling effect on the academic climate. We will continue to support the GAs in their efforts.

JANE BUCK
President, American Association of University Professors

New York City

According to the recently formed adjunct union, some 75 percent of classes at NYU are taught by adjuncts and graduate students, to reduce personnel costs. During the contract with the union, the number of fully funded graduate assistant positions fell from 1,300 to around 1,000, according to GSOC/UAW Local 2110. When the administration complains that Local 2110 interfered with “academic decision making,” it was referring to union grievances about the administration’s employing more adjuncts. In one case graduate students from Columbia University, rather than NYU, were hired. What NYU calls the “enterprise university” actually means outsourcing education to the lowest bidder.

NICHOLAS MIRZOEFF
Professor, New York University

New York City

We appreciate Scott Sherman’s reporting on the GA strike. “Bitter Winter at NYU” indeed: Graduate assistants walk the frigid picket lines to insist on their democratic right to union representation while the administration, led by a president appointed without customary search procedures, issues unprecedented threats of reprisal against some of the university’s most promising young scholars. The faculty, meanwhile, awakened to its own marginalization in the decision-making processes, attempts to organize itself around core principles of democratic governance. Our students, in their fight to retain the union they won in 2000 through legitimate democratic elections, have exposed this administration’s flagrant disregard for academic freedom and shared governance of the university.

A dispassionate examination of the record would indicate that it is not the union, in its four years of existence, that has encroached on academic freedom. It is the president, the provost and the University Leadership Team–whose unionbusting actions have included electronic eavesdropping on courses and unilaterally stripping departments of effective control over course staffing and even over grading procedures–who have been the real enemies of academic freedom. The university as a community that attempts to put into practice the lofty democratic ideals taught in its classrooms has been sadly transformed, not by the union or the graduate assistants but by the administration, which from the very beginning eschewed democratic procedures and proceeded down the road of unilateralism. The fractured situation at NYU is actually worse than Sherman imagines. The administration should negotiate with the union immediately.

REBECCA KARL
On behalf of 26 NYU faculty

New York City

It isn’t surprising that NYU’s administration wants to make decisions without having to bargain with a union. What is surprising is the extent to which NYU administrators, many of whom are scholars and professed liberals, are willing to compromise their intellectual integrity in support of their goal.

In 2000 the NLRB issued a unanimous decision granting graduate assistants at private universities, including NYU, the right to unionize. This bipartisan decision harmonized federal law with that of most states, which allow GAs at public universities to form unions. The NLRB found that because GAs provide services for NYU for which they are compensated, they are employees.

In 2004 a newly constituted NLRB, dominated by Republicans who have built their careers attacking unions, overturned that decision in a case involving GAs at Brown University. The Brown decision, poorly reasoned and intellectually dishonest, is part of the radical right’s antilabor campaign, which has eviscerated labor protections and reduced the number of workers shielded by the few safeguards that remain.

This Republican position, adopted by NYU, is based on several faulty premises, one of which is that teaching performed by GAs isn’t real work; it’s part of their academic program. Even NYU doesn’t believe this. Tellingly, striking GAs haven’t been threatened with expulsion from their academic programs for refusing to teach; they have been told that they won’t be paid. At most universities GAs provide 30 to 50 percent of all instruction. At NYU they teach all freshman English composition courses, the overwhelming majority of language courses, other core undergraduate requirements and discussion and laboratory sections associated with large lecture classes. Courses are assigned based on NYU’s instructional needs, not the pedagogical needs of the GAs. NYU receives full tuition for all GA-taught courses. It may be true, as NYU and the NLRB maintain, that teaching experience prepares graduate students for (the ever-shrinking number of) jobs in academia. But many jobs, in many fields, impart skills that allow for future advancement. In other fields this doesn’t eliminate labor rights.

Another faulty premise is that GAs shouldn’t be allowed to unionize because they are primarily students. It’s absurd to argue that because a worker is also other things her rights as a worker are dispensable. Federal labor law doesn’t exclude from its protections part-time workers who fulfill other roles.

Finally, NYU claims that bargaining threatens academic freedom. But academic workers organizing to defend their interests, and to compel administrators to consider their needs, is a bulwark of academic freedom. The real threat is from administrators intent on concentrating all decision-making in their own hands.

DANIEL J. RATNER, CARL J. LEVINE
Attorneys for the GAs’ union

Washington, DC

NYU has turned the clock back on democracy and workers’ rights. That’s quite a serious transgression, especially coming from a university that sees itself as “sanctuary.”

President John Sexton may be popular with large-donor fundraisers and his Ivy League colleagues who want to stop workers from having a voice on the job and a union contract. If he were smart, however, he’d listen more carefully to faculty members and others who have made it clear that his tactics are disgraceful and damaging to the reputation of the university.

Instead, Sexton is following the corporate management playbook to the letter–by threatening students with an ultimatum that they end their strike or be fired. That’s all too familiar to workers across America forced to pay a price every day for rights that are now better protected in Taiwan, South Africa and Brazil.

On December 10, International Human Rights Day, US workers and allies rallied in 100 cities, and were joined by activists from China to Europe, to make the case that bargaining rights and democracy are inextricably linked. In the weeks ahead Sexton will realize that the movement for true democracy is alive and well at NYU. Graduate student workers across the country must see NYU’s action as both the disgrace it is and the wake-up call that student workers everywhere need in order to restore their workplace rights. The rest of us must stand up and support them.

The Communications Workers of America fully supports the Graduate Student Organizing Committee and the UAW at NYU. We stand with graduate student workers everywhere who want to exercise their basic democratic rights.

LARRY COHEN, president,
Communications Workers of America

Brooklyn, NY

Our first contract raised our stipends by an average of 40 percent and provided employer-paid healthcare and training for NYU graduate assistants. Members of GSOC/UAW Local 2110 as well as NYU undergraduates, faculty and even administrators have attested that our contract has made us better at our jobs and has made NYU a better university. The reaction of John Sexton and the NYU administration to our strike has only underscored why we need a second contract.

MICHAEL PALM
Chair, GSOC/UAW Local 2110
PhD candidate, NYU

Ithaca, NY

As one of the nation’s leading experts in organizing under the NLRB, I have analyzed tens of thousands of NLRB election campaigns. NYU’s campaign against its graduate students stands out to me because it represents a non-profit institution that seems to have forgotten that it is in the business of higher education. It is making major employment decisions that will have a lasting impact on the quality of education of its undergraduate student body based solely on its own antiunion animus and the antiunion animus of the consortium of other universities that have joined NYU in the fight against the right of graduate students to engage in collective bargaining.

This means that instead of choosing TAs based on their expertise, teaching ability or experience, the sole criterion determining whether a graduate student will be teaching at NYU this spring is, Did he/she participate in the strike? Suddenly the business of the university has become strikebreaking and unionbusting, not education.

But that is the least of the tragedy. A lifetime ago, it seems, there was a notion of PhD students as apprentices, learning at the knee of the greatest scholars, who worked side by side with them, teaching them their trade, mentoring them. Graduate students were assigned to faculty in their field and were trained, supervised, evaluated and mentored, and they advanced with a guarantee of a professorship upon completion of their degree.

But for at least a quarter-century, graduate students have increasingly been doing more of the work while fewer tenure-track lines are being added. Graduate TAs are assigned classes based on department needs, given minimal training and supervision, rarely mentored and rarely teach the subject they actually plan to teach. And unfortunately, few are guaranteed a job upon completion of their degree. Instead of an educational opportunity, their teaching is the primary means through which they support themselves while going to graduate school. It is a job. One with long hours, low pay and limited benefits, but a job just the same–one that fits any definition of employee that the framers of the National Labor Relations Act had in mind.

Yes, Bush’s hand-picked NLRB overturned the ruling granting graduate students at NYU the right to organize, but the tides will shift again, and eventually no one will be able to deny the truth. Graduate students are workers; they are doing the work of universities when they are acting as teaching assistants. Universities are not teaching GAs how to be professors; GAs are making the machinery of the university work, and they are critical to the ability of universities to remain financially solvent. If graduate assistants did not exist, universities would have to hire adjunct faculty to take their place–or go back to hiring more tenure-track faculty. They can be replaced only with other employees because they are employees. It is time for NYU to start making decisions based on what is best for its students.

KATE BRONFENBRENNER
Director of Labor Education Research, Cornell University

SHERMAN REPLIES

Brooklyn, NY

Derrick Bell’s letter is a pitch-perfect recitation of the official NYU position, and his missive bears a close resemblance to the university’s press releases relating to the GSOC/UAW strike. Bell stamps my piece “one-sided.” But I carefully reported both sides of this story. I had extensive telephone and e-mail contact with NYU spokesman John Beckman, and I very much wanted to include the voice of President Sexton, but he declined to be interviewed. My article arrived at a conclusion Bell doesn’t like; but that does not automatically make it one-sided.

Bell proclaims that “about 10 percent” of NYU’s graduate assistants are on strike. But how can he be certain? Alas, the union won’t say how many GAs are striking (although it does affirm that more than 700 GSOC members voted to strike), and NYU itself probably doesn’t have an exact number either, since certain departments where GSOC is strong have refused to pass along that information to the NYU administration.

As I noted in the article, which was hardly “ad hominem,” talks between NYU and GSOC/UAW broke down because NYU insisted on an open shop along with a grievance procedure that did not entail binding arbitration. An August 2, 2005, letter from Terrance Nolan, NYU’s director of labor relations, to Elizabeth Bunn, secretary-treasurer of the UAW, put forth NYU’s “final proposal” for a contract: “In the new agreement,” Nolan wrote, “there will be no provision for arbitration. All grievances and disputes under the Agreement will be fully and finally decided by the Provost of the University or his/her designee.” Bunn replied on August 4: “A key component to every contract,” she wrote, “is a fair and neutral dispute resolution procedure…. Yet, you are proposing that the University decides in every case whether the University has violated the agreement. Such a notion is simply inconsistent with the concept of having a meaningful contract.” The contract expired August 31.

In justifying its hard-line attitude, NYU has recently insisted, as does Bell in his letter, that GSOC/UAW interfered with academic decision-making and thereby abused the grievance process. “In 2001,” Sexton wrote in an October 21 letter to parents of NYU students, the university “signed a contract with the UAW…because we received written assurances from the UAW that it would not seek to interfere with academic decision-making. Unfortunately, the Union did not keep its promise.”

One should treat this assertion with skepticism. During the four-year contract, there were approximately fifty grievances involving NYU and GSOC/UAW. NYU has released details concerning three of them. Space constraints prevent me from delving into these cases, none of which can be quickly summarized, but I refer interested readers to a November 3 essay by NYU physics professor Alan Sokal, in which he provides a detailed critique of two grievances (see “Some Thoughts on the Unionization of Graduate Assistants” at www.facultydemocracy.org). Sokal, who argues that neither side was clearly in the right, insists nevertheless that NYU’s public characterization of the grievances as purely “academic matters” and “not about economics” is a “gross oversimplification.”

Many observers at NYU view the administration’s “academic interference” argument as empty rhetoric that serves to conceal a deep hostility to unions in general and the UAW in particular. Sokal captures this point well in his essay: “The issue is not whether unionization of grad students is good for the grad students, or good for the university,” he writes. “The sole issue is whether the graduate assistants…should be allowed to bargain collectively with the University.” He concludes: “The University Administration adamantly opposes such collective representation irrespective of whether 51% or 67% or 99% of the grad students desire it. This has been their consistent position ever since the students’ organizing drive began in the mid-1990s. In the late 1990s they spent several million dollars of the University’s money (the precise figure has never been made public) on anti-union lawyers in a failed effort to prevent a representation election. They relented on their no-union position only during the brief period (2001-05) when federal law forced them to.”

SCOTT SHERMAN

On November 28, three weeks after graduate teaching assistants at New York University walked out on strike, president John Sexton dispatched a long missive to the strikers. Buried in paragraph seventeen was an explosive piece of information: For those students who return to work by December 5, Sexton proclaimed, “there will be no consequences.” And the fate of those who choose to stay on the picket line? Those “who do not resume their duties…will for the spring semester lose their stipend and their eligibility to teach.” (Most graduate assistants rely on stipends to cover their living expenses.)

Sexton’s threat was greeted with much shock and outrage on the Greenwich Village campus. An editorial in the Washington Square News, a daily student newspaper, called it a “frighteningly blunt ultimatum.” “The punishment that finally came down was far more extreme than I personally expected,” said NYU physics professor Alan Sokal, who has supported the strikers. “It’s totally unprecedented to say, Because you’ve been on strike for four weeks, you will therefore have the next semester–or two semesters–of your salary docked.”

The roots of the NYU conflict, which now seems stalemated, go back to 2000, when the National Labor Relations Board ruled, in a historic decision, that graduate assistants at private universities were “employees” and thus entitled to union representation [see Andrew Ross, “NYU’s Poison Ivy Itch,” October 3, 2005].

Subsequently, NYU became the first private university in the nation to negotiate a contract with a graduate student union–in this case, the Graduate Student Organizing Committee (GSOC), affiliated with the United Auto Workers. That contract lifted stipends from around $10,000 to $18,000 a year, provided full health insurance coverage and allowed for paid sick leave and holidays. Last year, in a 3-to-2 ruling involving Brown University, the NLRB, newly stacked with Bush appointees, reversed its earlier position on graduate student unionization–which seems to have emboldened NYU to adopt a rigid stance toward GSOC, since it is no longer legally compelled to negotiate with the union.

Talks between NYU and the GSOC collapsed in August after the university gave GSOC forty-eight hours to accept a new contract, one that–in the words of an open letter signed by 209 NYU faculty members–“contradicted the very definition of what it means to be represented by a union.” (Although other sources confirm this account, NYU spokesman John Beckman denies that there was an unwavering forty-eight-hour deadline.)

New York University, which insisted on an open shop and a grievance procedure that did not entail binding arbitration, decided, in Sexton’s words, to “move ahead without the union.” GSOC members voted to strike–not to achieve higher wages (NYU’s current pay scale is roughly equal to that of the old union contract) but to affirm their right to unionize. “To walk away from the union contract,” says Matthew Osypowski, a graduate student in creative writing who remains on strike, “would be a betrayal of those who fought for our first contract and those who will stand to inherit the benefits of the second.”

It was undoubtedly Sexton’s hope that his ultimatum would break the back of the union. His threat did, indeed, force an undetermined number of international students back to work, but not before dozens of them had unleashed their fury in a December 7 letter to the president: “We, as international students,” they wrote, “feel especially vulnerable to your antagonizing, intimidating and outrageous threats…we condemn these threats as signaling a sharp decline in NYU’s intellectual and ethical position in the academic and labor community.” (Some GSOCers who returned to work have indicated that they will not serve as replacement labor for comrades who remain on the picket line during the spring semester.)

But a significant number of core union members have stayed on strike. The GSOC, which operates out of a UAW office near Union Square, won’t reveal the exact number; it merely insists that “a majority” of its members are standing fast. Sources inside the GSOC estimate that somewhere between 150 and 200 graduate students are still striking, and that they are overwhelmingly concentrated in the humanities and social sciences: primarily history, English, sociology, anthropology, American studies, Spanish and Portuguese, and music. The GSOC has little clout or faculty support in politics, math, economics, psychology or the sciences.

The current conflict is not merely a brawl between the NYU administration and GSOC/UAW. Faculty members, some of whom have moved their classes off campus to avoid crossing the picket line, have emerged as significant actors, at least in the humanities and social sciences. Twenty-three departments in four schools have passed neutrality resolutions, in which professors have pledged not to punish students who went out on strike. (Some departments, English and linguistics, for instance, have gone further, insisting that they will not reveal to the administration the names of GSOC students involved in the labor action.) For many professors, including those who are ambivalent about the idea of a graduate student union, the strike has brought to the surface not only longstanding concerns about the Sexton administration–which is viewed in many quarters as secretive, authoritarian and indifferent to faculty governance–but also larger issues pertaining to the corporatization of higher education.

In recent weeks a number of concerned faculty have floated “third way” proposals to end the strike. One proposal, signed by sociologists David Garland, Steven Lukes and Troy Duster, among others, called for the creation of a new graduate assistant representative body that would be empowered to handle GA grievances–a notion that the GSOC dismissed on the grounds that it would “eliminate our union.”

So both sides seem hunkered down for a protracted fight. The stakes are high for John Sexton (who declined to be interviewed for this article) and for GSOC/UAW: At a town hall meeting in February, Sexton, a theologian who is given to sonorous pronouncements about “the university as sanctuary,” admitted, according to several GSOC members present, that he is under pressure from Ivy League colleagues to restrain the union. (Yale, Columbia and Brown are resolutely hostile to graduate student unions.) Other Sexton-watchers insist that NYU’s leader is committed to a top-down, paternalistic management style.

Many hopes have been invested in the GSOC as well, and AFL-CIO president John Sweeney–who views graduate student unions as a growth area for labor and also sees the administration’s actions as emblematic of the hostile climate for union organizing–has made three appearances on campus. If the GSOC is vanquished, it would have a chilling effect nationwide on graduate students attempting to forge collective bargaining agreements with private universities.

Meanwhile, pressure on NYU’s president, who has yet to carry out his promised reprisals against those who are still striking, is steadily increasing. Hundreds of scholars, writers and concerned citizens have written to Sexton to protest his actions and to warn him that NYU’s reputation is at stake. “Let me tell you, President Sexton,” wrote CUNY historian Jesse Lemisch, “these are our very best young people. They are among the most serious and dedicated scholars and teachers I have known.”

“NYU has become a great university, in size and quality,” wrote Harvard historian John Womack Jr. “You are threatening to wreck some of its infrastructure, and ruin the future of some of the best young scholars in the country; not smart.”

The myths about Conrad Black, Nicholas Coleridge noted in Paper Tigers, his wry survey of two dozen international newspaper tycoons, “all concern money and power: a family friend remembers blinking in disbelief as he watched, through the summer haze, an eight-year-old Conrad carefully washing dollar bills and hanging them out on a line to dry.” Five decades later, Black’s quest for money and power has brought him to the brink of ruin: According to a recent indictment prepared by Patrick Fitzgerald, the US Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois (and the man who indicted Lewis Libby), Black and several associates stole $52 million from Hollinger International, the publicly traded newspaper corporation Black controlled. The eleven-count indictment further alleges that Black abused corporate perks by billing Hollinger shareholders for a variety of lavish personal expenditures: a vacation in French Polynesia, renovations on a pricey Park Avenue apartment and a $62,000 birthday celebration for his wife, Barbara Amiel, at La Grenouille in New York City (where the wine and champagne bill came to $13,935). If found guilty, Black could face forty years in prison.

Black’s current difficulties sprouted in late 2003, when he faced a shareholder revolt at Hollinger: A special committee of the board charged Black and several cronies with the illegal use of $32 million in company funds. In early 2004 Hollinger removed Black from the chairmanship and sued him and others for plundering the corporation. A beleaguered Black found himself at odds with his handpicked board of directors, which included Henry Kissinger, Richard Perle and former Illinois Governor James Thompson. On January 20, 2004, the board met by teleconference to ratify Black’s removal and to approve the shareholders’ lawsuit. Kissinger, who had known Black for two decades, could no longer remain neutral and voted yes to green-light the lawsuit against his friend. Richard Siklos recounts the episode in his fine biography Shades of Black: “‘Henry, did you just vote against me?’ ‘Yesss,’ Kissinger repeated into the phone. ‘Et tu, Brute,’ replied Black.” (After considerable pressure from shareholders and management, six members of the board–including Kissinger, Perle and Thompson–decided not to stand for re-election in January.)

An imperial air of conquest and intrigue has long been a vital element of Black’s life. As a teenager, he devoured W.A. Swanberg’s biography of William Randolph Hearst, Citizen Hearst. Later he was expelled from prep school for selling copies of final exams. In the late 1960s Black began to acquire obscure newspapers in the Canadian provinces. By the time he was 50, he was the proprietor of one of the world’s largest newspaper companies, which he used as a springboard for social climbing on a grand scale: In 2001 Black was inducted into the British House of Lords, and obtained the title of Lord Black of Crossharbour. Black’s properties included the Jerusalem Post (which he pushed to the right by switching the paper’s support from Labor to Likud), the National Post of Toronto (which he used as a battering ram against the Canadian healthcare system), the Chicago Sun-Times and several prestigious media properties in London, including the Daily Telegraph and Spectator magazine. Hollinger provided a $200,000 annual subsidy to the influential right-of-center quarterly The National Interest, and the company also invested in the New York Sun, a scrappy conservative daily. (Hollinger has since sold the Jerusalem Post, the National Post and the Daily Telegraph.)

By and large American newspaper publishers prefer the shadows to the light, and when they do emerge they hardly raise whirlwinds. (Consider Arthur Sulzberger Jr.’s dismal November 10 appearance on Charlie Rose, when he evaded questions about recent convulsions at the New York Times.) Black exhaled fire: Siklos likened Black’s rhetorical invective to “verbal napalm.” Here is Black on media baron Robert Maxwell: “An endomorphic, shameless gadfly, poseur, fugitive and confidence trickster…one of history’s greatest swindlers, a crook of Dickensian and Zolaesque proportions.” On Quebec separatist René Lévesque: a “repulsive little gnome…greasy, twitchy and specious.” On journalists: “My experience with journalists authorizes me to record that a very large number of them are ignorant, lazy, opinionated, intellectually dishonest and inadequately supervised.”

Black’s self-image transcended that of raconteur: He fancied himself a serious intellectual, especially in matters of history, politics and diplomacy, and produced weighty tomes for the literary marketplace. In 2003 PublicAffairs published Black’s 1,300-page biography, Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, which received some glowing reviews in the United States: The Journal of American History proclaimed it “the liveliest and most comprehensive popular biography of Roosevelt to date.” (Booklist was less enthusiastic, deeming the work “frequently ponderous.”) Even Black’s powerful friends seemed to grow weary of his verbosity: After listening to a long recitation by Black on the armaments and tonnage of all the battleships in World War II, Margaret Thatcher reportedly declared, “I know, Conrad.”

Throughout his long career, Black relished his connections with the mighty and powerful. In addition to his friendships with Kissinger, Perle and Thatcher, Black cavorted with the likes of Ronald Reagan, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Condoleezza Rice, William F. Buckley Jr., David Brinkley, George Will (who reportedly received $25,000 for a single day’s toil for the Hollinger board) and Tom Wolfe. It was Wolfe who, in 2000, drafted a letter of recommendation supporting Black’s quest for membership in Manhattan’s exclusive Century Club. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Wolfe wrote, “Conrad Black has done more for the lively, provocative, and sane discussion of the important social, political, and intellectual issues of our time than any newspaper publisher of the past decade. He is also a delightful, charming, congenial gentleman. He is not merely a good candidate for the Century–we need him.” Reading Patrick Fitzgerald’s exhaustive sixty-page indictment, one gets the feeling that Conrad Black’s final destination will not be an armchair in the Century Club but a bunk in a prison cell.

A photograph by Eugene Richards, currently on display at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in Manhattan, captures a subdued moment in the life of a US military “adviser” stationed abroad. The man–white, in his 30s, with an elongated mustache–is sprawled out in bed reading a book. A pistol lies on the mattress. Pinups from Playboy and Hustler cover the walls. A rifle rests upright. It could be a scene from present-day Iraq or Afghanistan, except for one detail: A hefty dictionary perched on his shelf is not in Arabic or Pashto but in Spanish. The year is 1983, and the country is El Salvador.

Richards’s work is a centerpiece of “El Salvador: Work of Thirty Photographers,” a show that brings together five dozen images produced by international correspondents stationed there between 1979 and 1983. The photographs first appeared in a book that Susan Meiselas, Harry Mattison, Fae Rubenstein and Carolyn Forché assembled in 1983, in an effort to raise public consciousness about the Salvadoran conflict, then in its bloodiest phase; an exhibition of the pictures subsequently toured the country for two years, stopping at museums, churches, libraries and universities. The collection was recently donated in its entirety to the ICP and will be on display there until November 27.

The Salvadoran civil war, which raged for a dozen years before a negotiated settlement was reached in 1992, now seems to belong to a distant past, but it was a conflict that claimed 75,000 lives in El Salvador and cost the US taxpayer more than $4 billion. The show works powerfully on the mind and the heart because it brings back a flood of memories from those years.

Before us are stark black-and-white images of the martyrs and victims whose deaths did so much to launch a grassroots movement against US intervention in El Salvador, and to expose the savagery of the Salvadoran military: the three American nuns and a lay worker–Ita Ford, Maura Clarke, Dorothy Kazel and Jean Donovan–whose bodies were tossed into a shallow grave; Archbishop Oscar Romero, gunned down by a sharpshooter while saying mass in San Salvador; and the hundreds of civilians killed at El Mozote in 1981 by the American-trained Atlacatl Battalion, one of the most infamous massacres in Latin American history.

Many of these photographs received considerable attention when they were originally published in journals ranging from The New York Times Magazine to Paris Match, and down through the years they have lost none of their ability to shock and incite. There is Alain Keler’s image of a teenager killed in the capital by the National Guard after a street theater performance critical of the government: The young man lies in his coffin, on top of which someone has scrawled: “I love you, I will not forget you, I will tell my daughter about you when she grows up and can understand”; there is Susan Meiselas’s picture of three white handprints emblazoned on the red wooden door of a slain peasant organizer in Chalatenango province: The mano blanco was the macabre signature of the death squads. And there is Michel Philippot’s depiction of left-wing activists being tossed face-down into the back of a military pickup truck, stacked like wood, guarded by grim-faced soldiers with machine guns.

Some of the lesser-known photographs are equally stirring. In one remarkable shot by Mattison, taken in Usulután in 1981, we see fifteen campesinos, men and women alike, building a barricade across the Pan American Highway. We see only their backs and their hands outstretched in furious labor as they overturn a massive white pickup truck–an image that somehow seems to encapsulate the entire history of campesino rebellion in Latin America. The show isn’t all darkness, mayhem and agitation, however: In Christian Poveda’s “Portraits of Guerrillas,” taken in Chalatenango in 1981, we glimpse six young male fighters posing with their weapons, in various states of pride and unease, looking like soldiers from the Mexican Revolution. And Keler’s, Meiselas’s and Mattison’s shots of weddings, fiestas and chupaderos are a reminder that life in El Salvador proceeded apace despite the disruptions and violence of civil war.

“There was a sense of urgency,” Meiselas said a few weeks ago, reflecting on the circumstances that prompted her group to assemble the book and the traveling exhibition in 1983. “One felt at that time that documenting it, being a witness, was the only justified act one could do. There was a belief that you could sort of ‘call out’ from Central America and it would give presence to something that was so distant for the public here.”

“El Salvador: Work of Thirty Photographers” takes on new meaning in the shadow of the US war in Iraq. Newsweek reported in January that the Pentagon was considering a “Salvador option” in Iraq, in which Special Forces teams “would advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads…to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers.” The US public has largely forgotten the Salvador conflict, but it appears that the Pentagon has not. In this context the show at the ICP is many things: a powerful testimonial to the stoicism and resilience of Salvadorans, whose postwar tribulations are still poorly understood by Americans; a homage to a group of politically conscious photographers who risked their safety to bring us these images (three of the photographers in the show died while reporting from Central America); and a haunting, incontrovertible reminder that the “Salvador option” leads directly to the charnel house.

“It’s an elitist enterprise,” Newt Gingrich declared in 1995, amid a fierce (and unsuccessful) Republican campaign to “zero out” funds for the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio. At Gingrich’s side stood South Dakota Senator Larry Pressler, who excoriated viewers of Washington’s PBS affiliate, WETA. One out of every eight contributors to WETA, declared Pressler, “is a millionaire, one out of seven has a wine cellar and one out of three spent time in Europe in the last three years.” A decade later public broadcasting is again under pressure, but this time the threat comes not primarily from Congress–which recently voted down a proposal to gut the annual budget of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, an entity that provides essential funding for public radio and TV stations–but from an activist CPB board brimming over with conservatives.

Kenneth Tomlinson, a former editor in chief of Reader’s Digest and a friend of Karl Rove, is the current chairman of the CPB board and the man chiefly responsible for the latest crusade against public broadcasting. In recent months Tomlinson has installed Patricia Harrison, a former co-chair of the Republican National Committee, as president of the CPB; permitted a White House staffer to draft guidelines for two new CPB ombudsmen (Ken Bode and William Schulz, formerly of Reader’s Digest); and secretly hired an obscure, Indiana-based conservative consultant, Frederick Mann, to systematically analyze the content of several PBS and NPR programs: NOW With Bill Moyers, The Diane Rehm Show, Tucker Carlson: Unfiltered and The Tavis Smiley Show. Mann’s sprawling content analysis, riddled with typos and misspellings, uses a very broad brush to categorize guests as “liberal,” “conservative” or “neutral.” The Mann study, according to Senator Byron Dorgan, is “an amateur attempt to prove there was a liberal bias” on the public airwaves.

And yet Tomlinson (and his allies in the White House) have demonstrated greater political acuity than Gingrich and Pressler. Gone is the bombast about liberal elites and wine cellars; Tomlinson has instead positioned himself as an unlikely champion of “objectivity and balance” on public radio and TV. “NOW With Bill Moyers,” Tomlinson wrote in a December 2003 letter to PBS president Pat Mitchell, “does not contain anything approaching the balance the law requires for public broadcasting.” He was alluding to the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, a contested portion of which, Section 396, calls for “strict adherence to objectivity and balance in all programs.” But the text of the law is ambiguous, because three paragraphs later the CPB–which was created as a firewall between Congress and the stations–is instructed to “assure the maximum freedom” of public broadcasters by adopting a laissez-faire attitude toward editorial content. Embracing one aspect of Section 396 and sidestepping another, Tomlinson has aggressively imposed the “objectivity and balance” clause on public broadcasters.

PBS executives, for their part, have worked to accommodate the needs of a more conservative CPB. “By spring 2003,” according to the trade newspaper Current, “PBS was quietly letting major producers know that it wanted proposals for programs that would add conservative balance to the schedule.” In November 2003 PBS announced the launch of a new series hosted by Tucker Carlson. A year later the Journal Editorial Report, hosted by Paul Gigot, hit the public airwaves, backed by Tomlinson and funded by CPB. (Carlson’s show also received CPB funding.) But the new conservative programs weren’t sufficient for Tomlinson, and his CPB continues to squeeze PBS. Earlier this year, according to the New York Times, a CPB contract granting $26 million to PBS was held up after the CPB insisted PBS enforce the “objectivity and balance” clause in the 1967 charter–a request, according to PBS lawyers, that constituted a serious threat to PBS’s editorial independence. The money was eventually released, but CPB’s initial posture was disturbing to the PBS leadership.

Tomlinson’s machinations have drawn considerable media attention, yet few commentators have pointed out that his actions fit neatly into a recognizable pattern that goes back to the Nixon years, when Republicans first sought to manipulate and control the new public broadcasting entity. In the early 1970s Reed Irvine, the late founder of Accuracy in Media (AIM), accused PBS of neglecting Section 396. Spooked by various PBS documentaries, AIM pressured the Federal Communications Commission to enforce the “objectivity and balance” clause. The FCC declined. In 1977 Senator Orrin Hatch tried again to push the FCC to enforce the clause with a bill titled the Public Broadcasting Fairness Act, but it went nowhere.

In the late 1970s leading advocates of public broadcasting clearly understood the readiness of conservative critics to exploit Section 396. In Made Possible By…: The Death of Public Broadcasting in the United States, James Ledbetter noted that the Carter Administration, in the wake of the Hatch bill, recognized Section 396 as a source of “continued mischief” and considered eliminating the “objectivity and balance” requirements. In 1979 Frank Lloyd, one of Carter’s leading advisers on public broadcasting, accurately predicted that “individual Congressmen will continue to use the clause as a justification for closer CPB control of internal journalistic program judgments and close Congressional oversight of those decisions.” But Section 396 remained on the books, and conservative critics in the Reagan era took note of it. Indeed, the historical record suggests that the notion of quantifying the political content of specific shows did not originate with Tomlinson but with two members of the Reagan-era CPB (each of whom perceived a liberal bias on PBS): Sonia Landau and Richard Brookhiser. According to Ledbetter, Brookhiser proposed a content analysis that would confirm or disprove Irvine’s old allegations about liberal bias, but the idea ran into resistance from public broadcasters and was abandoned–until Tomlinson commissioned his content analysis from Mann.

The latest Republican offensive against public broadcasting has yielded mixed results. On June 23 the House repudiated an attempt to slash $100 million from the CPB’s 2006 budget–“a huge moral victory for public broadcasting,” according to PBS president Pat Mitchell. Yet recent events have once again illuminated two sobering facts about our public broadcasting system: its vulnerability to Congressional appropriations on the one hand and political chicanery from CPB board members on the other. These realities have plagued the system since its birth in the late 1960s, and they remain pressing issues today. From its inception, the CPB board has been a repository for patronage appointments for Democrats and Republicans alike. One current board member, Cheryl Halpern, has, along with her family, donated more than $324,000 to Republican causes since 1989. Another, Gay Hart Gaines, was a top fundraiser for Gingrich. Periodic attempts to depoliticize the board have failed: Last year, the Association of Public Television Stations launched a campaign to allocate four board seats to public broad casting station representatives, but the efforts were thwarted.

No issue in public broadcasting is more urgent than that of funding. Alternative proposals to guarantee the financial independence of the public broadcasting system have been floating around since the late 1960s, when members of the Carnegie Commission attempted to implement a BBC-style license fee on television sets, a proposal that sparked furious private sector opposition. Currently, the federal subsidy for public broadcasting in England is almost $27 per citizen, compared with $1.80 in the United States. Until we find a way to resolve the gargantuan funding issues, conservatives in Congress and their lackeys on the CPB board–who are united by a fear of hard-hitting, independent public affairs programming–will continue to wield Section 396 as a weapon, and our public broadcasting system, four decades after its birth, will remain an easy target for Republican deception, demagogy and mischief.

WHERE HAVE YOU GONE PUBLIC RADIO?

Washington, DC

In the course of his reporting on National Public Radio [“Good, Gray NPR,” May 23], Scott Sherman contacted me to ask about my perceptions of the network, where I have worked for the past year as one of NPR’s two managing editors. During our interview, Sherman asked me whether it was true that NPR’s vice president of news, Bruce Drake, had blocked any of my journalistic initiatives. I told him–on the record and for use in his article–that, to the contrary, Drake had been 100 percent supportive of my work since I joined the staff and that I considered him a good man and a good journalist. Despite the fact that I provided Sherman with that assessment, he chose to report that NPR sources “anticipate future discord” between Drake and myself.

As a reporter, I believe it’s critically important to rely on evidence and experience provided by on-the-record sources rather than the fears and predictions of anonymous critics. If Sherman chose to emphasize the anonymous critics’ dire predictions, then as a matter of fundamental fairness he had an obligation to share with his readers my belief that Drake is a talented editor and a highly supportive colleague. I hope this letter will undo some of the damage done by Sherman’s unfair description of my relationship with Bruce Drake and the anonymous disparagement of his excellent journalistic skills.

BILL MARIMOW
Managing editor, National Public Radio

Joliet, Ill.

Scott Sherman takes NPR to task for being too timid to engage in “kick-ass journalism.” As a dismayed listener, I would be glad if the network just stopped kissing ass so assiduously. Since the churlishly abrupt dismissal of longtime host Bob Edwards, NPR’s flagship news program, Morning Edition, seems to have abandoned its critical faculties altogether. Tune in, and if you don’t hear unquestioning acceptance of Republican spin, paeans to the religious right or a simple-minded sermon disguised as commentary, just wait five minutes.

JOANNE STRILEY

Whitefish, Mont.

If NPR is to have relevance and remain solvent, listenership is necessary. If in fact 71 percent of the respondents are not liberal, what’s wrong with NPR news the way it is? Here in Montana, I live in a wasteland of media choices. I think the competition among noncommercial distributors is very healthy. Despite NPR’s loss of its original bite, it will take a cataclysmic event for it to sink to parity with the commercial pablum. Most of NPR’s stories are in-depth and interesting.

DAVE FERN

Adair, Okla.

Here in conservative Oklahoma, I tend to feel like a lonely petunia in an onion patch. Perhaps NPR is less radical than it was, but in my neck of the woods, it’s the only source of balanced news and left-leaning editorial. The words of NPR have to be well positioned and artfully chosen to dent the rural Oklahoman consciousness. Does it do the job? All I know is that I hear bits of fact and anecdote repeated that had to have come from the station I listen to. The venom and spittal of AM talk-radio is, frankly, childish and not worth imitating. Cool reason with a dash of wit are better for the long haul. I’m glad NPR has chosen a subtle rather than a “kick-ass” approach to journalism.

VIRGINIA HOYT

San Francisco

NPR is vanilla. But in pointing out how “white” NPR remains, Scott Sherman refers only to Hispanics and blacks. NPR and Sherman should also think of multiracial people, of Asian-Americans, etc. We all listen to the radio, and we feel the need to hear our perspectives on public airwaves.

NGUYEN QUI DUC

Washington, DC

I have no TV, never have. I am retired–get most of my serious info from The New York Review of Books, The Nation and the Internet. What I listen to on NPR: the weather, commuter traffic, time, To the Point and the opera, when it’s on. I am confused and amused by nostalgia for “quirky, spontaneous and risky” reporting. Does “risky” refer to telling truth to power? No fear of that on NPR these days.

JENEFER ELLINGSTON

Waco, Tex.

Another source of disappointment in NPR: It seems to lack a copy editor. Reporters frequently misuse or mispronounce words, have banished the objective case of the relative pronoun, confuse persuade with convince, shift from singular to plural, use unreferenced pronouns, etc. A network that aspires to offer a first-rate alternative to the networks must also offer first-rate English.

BRENT M. FROBERG

North Truro, Mass.

I must take exception to the complaint about “the NPR drone.” Never mind that it is vastly preferable to the false hysteria of commercial stations. The point is, it makes an NPR station easily recognizable if you’re surfing the dial. When traveling, I’m always looking for a local NPR station (we can be grateful that NPR is almost everywhere). It takes only a few words to recognize that characteristic sound.

And while it’s true that NPR is not a left network, it is perhaps the only network that presents a liberal viewpoint and allows conservatives to offer theirs.

MARIAN PRESSLER

SHERMAN REPLIES

Brooklyn, NY

I thank readers for their many thoughtful letters about my article. Bill Marimow seems eager to assert that his relationship with his boss, Bruce Drake, is harmonious. Fair enough. But the central issue is this: In recent years, NPR has largely neglected investigative reporting. Top executives at the network insist that Marimow, whom I praised in my article, was hired to change that situation. There is much in Marimow’s history to suggest that he is the right man for the job. But there is little in Drake’s history to suggest that he is strongly committed to muckraking and risk-taking. Can Marimow take NPR’s news coverage beyond the realm of polite, middle-of-the-road reporting and toward something more gutsy, confrontational and memorable? Experienced NPR staffers I spoke with have serious doubts about his ability to do that, owing to inertia at the highest levels of the network. I wish Marimow luck.

SCOTT SHERMAN

DEFINITELY ABOVE AVERAGE

Middlesex, NY

Thank you for Garrison Keillor’s brilliant, insightful “Confessions of a Listener” [May 23] in that particular, unique style of his that is always so artistic, creative, humorous and damning, all at the same time.

BILL YOUHASS

Lloydminster, Saskatchewan

What a relief to read “Confessions of a Listener.” It’s great to be reminded that there are good things in the world even though very ugly people are screaming for our attention so much right now.

ALICE GRADAUER

Brandon, Fla.

Garrison Keillor’s piece is extremely amusing, but I take issue with his statement (far too close to dogmatic): “There’s nobody so humorless as a devout atheist.” As one myself, I have known a great number, and never have I encountered a humorless one. (Didn’t I just say I found his article amusing?) How many jokes will a Christian make about the virgin birth? Or a Muslim about the Koran?

ABIGAIL ANN MARTIN

Hillsdale, NJ

Is Garrison Keillor kidding? Unlike the children of Lake Wobegon, the adults who live in/listen to AM talkradioland are below average and have as much interest in NPR as they do in string theory. They are easily conned into voting against their better interest, and the talk-show hosts know which of their buttons to push, appealing to their fears, resentments, prejudices and cruelty. They made the difference in the last two presidential elections and will be a factor in 2006 and 2008. To make light of this boil on the body politic is reminiscent of the people who regarded Hitler as just a buffoon. I hope Keillor is kidding.

JOE ADAMS

Floral Park, NY

In 1969 and ’70, I was one of those college kids in a tiny radio studio broadcasting to a captive audience in the cafeteria and student lounge of Queens College in New York City. We had a fabulous time reading news ripped from an ancient AP teletype, playing LPs, covering campus demonstrations and sit-ins and, yes, achieving the weightlessness of which Garrison Keillor speaks. After we shut down for the night, I’d drive home listening to WWVA in Wheeling, West Virginia, or stations in Toronto or other points north fading in and out. (And I never did learn to swat that pesky fly with my 15-transistor, 9-volt portable radio.)

RAY E. SKRABUT

TAKE A REST NOW!

Boulder, Mont.

Thank you to Lizzy Ratner for her timely article about Amy Goodman and Democracy Now! [“Amy Goodman’s ‘Empire,’” May 23] Amy is a journalistic necessity. However, I attended a speech of hers on May 13 at a church in St. Louis. She was so exhausted she could barely stand. Her eyes were deeply sunken and she moved like an 85-year-old. Amy–please get some sleep! We need you, and Democracy Now!, for the long haul!

PAUL RICHARDS

LET’S HEAR IT FOR LPTV!

Wauwatosa, Wisc.

Thank you for Rick Karr’s wonderful article on low-power radio [“Prometheus Unbound,” May 23]. I hope you’ll discover low-power television. That service was launched by the FCC and Congress twenty-three years ago. There are now close to 3,000 LPTV stations in America, many of them broadcasting local independent fare.

JOHN KOMPAS

PRICK UP YOUR EARS

Denver

There was no mention in your radio issue of KGNU in Colorado, which has expanded from Boulder to Denver on FM and AM. This is direct resistance to media monopoly and a beautiful example for other communities to follow. Community-based stations across the country are sustainable, practical experiments in democracy.

EVAN WEISSMAN

Fountain City, Wisc.

Radio is a part of my driving life. You can record Internet programming to replay in your car. Just run a cable from the computer headphone jack to the microphone or Aux connector of a cassette recorder.

JEFF FALK

In January 2002 National Public Radio launched The Tavis Smiley Show, a daily one-hour magazine program featuring a high-velocity mixture of commentary, reporting and analysis, and hosted by one of the most energetic and ambitious young media personalities in the country. The first new daily program produced at NPR in a generation, The Tavis Smiley Show was directed at an audience poorly served by public radio: African-Americans. According to NPR, it did quite well in terms of ratings. But the honeymoon didn’t last: Smiley felt that NPR was not doing enough to promote his program among nonwhite listeners, and his contract negotiations with the network collapsed in late 2004, after which he went on the offensive against NPR. “It is ironic,” he informed Time, “that a Republican president has an administration that is more inclusive and more diverse than a so-called liberal-media-elite network.”

Smiley directed his firepower at an organization that has accomplished a great deal in recent years. Thanks in part to NPR’s comprehensive foreign coverage, its listenership has soared since 9/11: In the wake of the attacks on New York and Washington, NPR gained (and has kept) nearly 4 million new listeners, and the network’s various programs now reach 23 million listeners a week on more than 780 member stations. Morning Edition is now the most listened-to morning show in the country. As the listenership grew, so did the philanthropic largesse: In November 2003 NPR received a stunning $236 million bequest from the estate of Joan Kroc, the widow of McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc.

But Smiley ruined the party both by calling attention to the shortcomings of an institution that emerged from Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and by underlining the gap between NPR’s rhetoric–in this case, about racial inclusion–and reality. The entity that calls itself National Public Radio, he reminded us, is not serving the entire public. “You’d be amazed,” he told Salon, “at the number of people of color who do not know what NPR is.”

In its journalism and its financial structure, NPR has indeed evolved into a somewhat different entity from what its founders envisioned. On May 3, 1971, it went on the air with the first broadcast of All Things Considered. The program began with a kaleidoscopic account of a major antiwar rally in Washington, DC, at which more than 6,000 people were arrested. “Excuse me,” NPR’s reporter asked a police sergeant attempting to quell the protests, “Is that a technique? Where the men actually try to drive the motorcycles right into the demonstrators?” Three decades later, rough-edged, in-your-face reportage has largely been supplanted by conventional punditry from the likes of Cokie Roberts, Daniel Schorr and David Brooks, and by consciously mainstream news reporting by correspondents whose voices are often indistinguishable from one another.

To some extent, financial and political pressures help to explain NPR’s turn toward mainstream respectability and high-minded professionalism: NPR’s founders had every expectation that public funds would cover the budget, but Republican hostility to public broadcasting thwarted those early hopes and dreams. Three decades after its creation, NPR now draws a significant portion of its funding from corporations such as Wal-Mart, Sodexho and Archer Daniels Midland. Likewise, NPR had sound journalistic reasons for turning away from its edgy, countercultural roots. Over the past decade, as media conglomerates dumped public-affairs programming in favor of “infotainment” and tabloid trash, NPR recognized the void and moved to fill it with high-quality news reporting. That news-oriented model, by drawing in listeners hungry for substantial coverage of politics and public affairs, has enabled NPR to thrive: Today, it continues to add correspondents and bureaus at a time when most other major news organizations are trimming them. A fair-minded evaluation must conclude that if NPR has turned its back on some of the values enshrined in its original mission statement, it has also, in other ways and despite enormous political pressure from its detractors, remained true to them as well.

But a price was paid on the road to respectability. With growth and stability has come stodginess, predictability and excessive caution. NPR was founded as an antidote to the mainstream media. Its founders had a unique journalistic and cultural vision that contrasted sharply with the values of establishment publications like the New York Times and the Washington Post. As NPR began its transformation into a middle-of-the-road, “hard news” entity in the mid-1970s, some of the founders warned that the experiment could end badly, with NPR sounding like an aural equivalent of The Congressional Record. That didn’t happen, but today’s NPR does, at times, seem quite empty and soulless, very much like the eminent daily newspapers its executives venerate.

Some NPR veterans are acutely aware of what has been lost since NPR’s birth in 1971. “Over the years, we’ve become much more sober,” says Susan Stamberg, who was an early co-host of All Things Considered, and who remains a lively and mischievous presence at NPR today. “We’ve become the good, gray Times. They’ve put color on their front page”–Stamberg pauses for her trademark cackle–“but we’re upholding the gray. We’re not nearly as quirky as we used to be. And I miss it.”

NPR came into existence almost accidentally. The 1967 legislation that gave birth to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was intended solely for public television, but a small group of 1950s-era professionals from the world of educational radio managed to slip the phrase “and radio” into the legislation. In doing so, they displeased the power brokers in the new universe of public broadcasting and contributed to their own exclusion from the new public radio entity, which fell into the hands of a younger generation of educational radio managers, a few of whom had direct ties to the 1960s counterculture.

Chief among them was Bill Siemering, who ran WBFO at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Under Siemering, WBFO provided coverage of the campus antiwar movement and the student strikes that were broken up by the police. But Siemering was interested in the world beyond the university: He set up a storefront studio in Buffalo’s ghetto and encouraged local residents to learn the art of radio. He viewed public radio as a grassroots, bottom-up, somewhat anarchistic phenomenon.

It was Siemering who wrote NPR’s original mission statement in 1970, which called for “some hard news, but the primary emphasis would be on interpretation, investigative reporting on public affairs, the world of ideas and the arts.” NPR’s mission statement was not a radical document but a liberal and populist one. And the founders had every desire to serve an alternative audience: “urban areas with sizeable nonwhite audiences,” “student groups studying ecology,” “groups with distinct lifestyles and interests not now served by electronic media.” Siemering’s document was something of a blueprint for NPR in its first decade, but as the years went by, management lost interest in it. Not long ago, outside archivists requested the document from NPR headquarters, but no copy could be found.

The first broadcast of All Things Considered led with the segment about the protest rally, followed by a zesty array of stories: a roundtable discussion with reporters from the Christian Science Monitor, which segued into a reading of two antiwar poems from the era of World War I; a dispatch from a barber shop in Iowa whose proprietor was reeling from lost income as more men chose to wear their hair long; a portrait of a nurse turned heroin addict; and, finally, a discussion between Allen Ginsberg and his father, Louis, about the merits and shortcomings of drug abuse.

That quirky mix more or less characterized NPR through the mid-1970s, when the arrival of president Frank Mankiewicz laid the groundwork for NPR’s transformation into something much closer to a “hard news” organization. Mankiewicz brought financial resources and visibility to NPR, but he also brought conventional journalistic practices–for example, editors. Until 1975 or so, reporters at NPR had worked on their own, with minimal supervision and editorial guidance.

Of the changes ushered in by Mankiewicz, Jack Mitchell, in his new book, Listener Supported, writes, “Gone was the notion, so central to the thinking of the first NPR board, of public radio as the people’s instrument. The vox populi became the voice of the best professionals.” Some of those professionals–Nina Totenberg, Cokie Roberts and Linda Wertheimer–had close ties to the Washington establishment. They were the sort of “coolly objective journalists” Siemering and his colleagues had hoped would steer clear of NPR. But Wertheimer & Co. were more or less in control by the time NPR collapsed financially in 1983.

That crisis resulted from financial incompetence and cuts in funding for public broadcasting, which hit public radio especially hard. Rescue came in the form of a substantial loan from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), and from a vigorous fundraising drive by NPR’s member stations. (Owing to the decentralized nature of public radio in the United States, the stations have a major say in how NPR does business. NPR itself owns no stations; it merely produces and distributes programming for the member stations. Some, like WNYC in New York and WBEZ in Chicago, produce programming that is regarded by many as often superior to NPR’s.) Out of the crisis arose a new NPR–leaner, better managed, more news-oriented, more enamored of audience research and more eager to demonstrate to the world that it was no longer an alternative or countercultural institution.

Indeed, NPR executives had reason to be concerned about the network’s image in Washington. Richard Nixon loathed public broadcasting, and nominated the ultraconservative industrialist Joseph Coors to the CPB board. Financially, public radio did well in the Ford and Carter years, but the arrival of Ronald Reagan led, in 1983, to a 20 percent reduction in the federal appropriation for public broadcasting. By the mid-1980s, NPR, still on shaky financial footing, was under pressure from political actors like the Heritage Foundation and The New Republic, which published a much-discussed attack on the network in 1986 by Fred Barnes, wherein he claimed that NPR had an inherent bias against conservatives and a reflexive sympathy for left-wing movements in Central America. Writing in Mother Jones in 1987, Laurence Zuckerman chronicled a series of newsroom conflicts over US intervention in Grenada and Nicaragua, conflicts that helped to determine the network’s overall political direction in the Reagan era. At one point State Department officials complained that an All Things Considered segment was too critical of the US-backed contra rebels. Then-news director Robert Siegel, according to Mother Jones, invited those officials to lunch and concluded that the piece was indeed problematic. Gary Covino, who produced the controversial segment, told Mother Jones, “The way [Siegel] handled this story sent the message spoken and unspoken that this was not the kind of stuff NPR should be doing…. Many people picked it up very quickly and began censoring themselves.”

NPR’s coverage of the 1991 Gulf War marked the network’s arrival into the media big leagues. With a million dollars from CPB and the member stations, NPR for the first time sent a team of its own correspondents to cover a war from the field. In the 1990s, as profit-hungry television and radio stations retreated from in-depth reporting on politics and public affairs, NPR endeavored to take over that role. It did so with considerable integrity and professionalism. Awards were racked up; new foreign and domestic bureaus were created. Educated listeners gravitated toward NPR in times of political ferment and, with few options available to them for serious news, stayed for the long haul. By the mid-1990s, NPR was finally in possession of the professional recognition it had long desired. “NPR does a really rich mix of reporting and coverage of the United States,” says Martin Turner, who heads the BBC’s Washington office. “It’s a pretty high standard.”

By and large, and with key exceptions, NPR’s critics fall into three groups. There is little doubt that NPR is most concerned about the first, and most vocal, group: political conservatives. In 1994 Newt Gingrich and his fellow Republicans put public broadcasting on the chopping block, vowing to “zero it out” of the federal budget. The effort backfired, as viewers and listeners besieged Congress with calls and letters defending public radio and TV. Gingrich & Co. lost the battle to choke off public funds to NPR, but they probably emerged victorious in a larger quest: to anchor NPR in the political center. In a 1995 conversation with University of Maine professor Michael McCauley, who has written an authoritative new book, NPR: The Trials and Triumphs of National Public Radio, Reed Irvine of Accuracy in Media admitted that he felt NPR aired less objectionable material in the 1990s than it did in the 1980s, when AIM first began to assail the network on ideological grounds. These days, Newt Gingrich himself is full of praise for NPR: “Either it is a lot less on the left,” he remarked in 2003, “or I have mellowed.” (NPR itself trumpets the Gingrich turnaround in its press packet as “an amusing fact.”)

The second camp of critics consists of people who object to the way in which NPR has ceded political space to the likes of Barnes, Irvine, Gingrich and Pat Buchanan (who once dubbed NPR “an upholstered little playpen of our Chablis-and-brie set”). These critics see NPR as too mainstream, too spineless and timid, too deferential to power. They point to a revolving door between the US government and NPR (president Kevin Klose, for example, was formerly the head of the International Broadcasting Bureau, which oversees Voice of America, Radio Martí and TV Martí); they lament the narrow range of political opinion on NPR (no current NPR commentator, they note, has the progressive credentials of the late Michael Harrington, who had a regular slot on NPR in the 1980s); and they point to NPR’s campaign against low-power radio stations [see Rick Karr].

One does sense a creeping caution and conservatism at NPR over the past decade. In 1994 it engaged death-row inmate (and former WHYY radio reporter) Mumia Abu-Jamal to do a series of brief commentaries on prison life and the death penalty but soon reversed itself in the wake of a vigorous campaign from Senator Bob Dole and Philadelphia’s Fraternal Order of Police (“A sterling parable for the new, mature NPR” was James Ledbetter’s ironic description of the Abu-Jamal fiasco in his book Made Possible By…). In 1995 Andrei Codrescu, one of the few really pungent voices left on NPR, produced a commentary about Armageddon that drew 40,000 complaints from the Christian Coalition. To Codrescu’s apparent dismay, NPR rushed to apologize for his segment, after which NPR executives informed Current, a trade newspaper, that they would step up their policing of the daily commentaries. In 2000 TV Guide and Current reported that NPR had allowed three officers from a specialized propaganda unit of the US Army based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to intern at its news programs over a nine-month period. At the time an NPR executive called the decision “a real goof.”

Since 9/11 NPR’s ombudsman, Jeffrey Dvorkin, has devoted a number of his columns at npr.org to the network’s coverage of the Bush Administration and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s perhaps too early for a definitive assessment of NPR’s reporting on these subjects, but what’s clear is that quite a few listeners are dissatisfied with the coverage of George W. Bush and his foreign policy. Consider a recent missive from Richard Steinman, a research scientist at Columbia University. On the weekend of March 19, 2005, Steinman turned on his radio, looking for coverage of the demonstrations that marked the second anniversary of the Iraq War. In a subsequent letter to Dvorkin, Steinman recounted NPR’s programming choices that weekend: “a ‘patriotic,’ feel-good West Point piece; sports fans’ feelings toward a baseball player (yes, steroids); more feel-good filler about an Iraqi-American painter and her use of color; Bantu Refugees Adjust to New Lives in America. Quote from the story: ‘we give the government of America the high five’; Army Chefs Battle for Best-Dish Honors; a singing physics professor.”

NPR executives bristle at the implication that the programming is frivolous. “It is easy,” says vice president of news and information Bruce Drake, “to carve out one small period or point of coverage and use it as a foundation for this kind of criticism–but it wholly ignores the large body of work that NPR has done over the last two years.” Drake has a point: Much of NPR’s Iraq reportage has indeed been of high quality, and he has the awards (including a Peabody) to prove it.

Yet listeners like Steinman are correct to ask searching questions about NPR and Iraq, especially since some of the network’s luminaries have not been shy about expressing their own views on that subject. In October 2002 political correspondent Mara Liasson, in an appearance on Fox News Sunday, assailed two Democratic Congressmen for traveling to Iraq. “These guys are a disgrace,” she said. “Look, everybody knows it’s…Politics 101 that you don’t go to an adversary country, an enemy country, and badmouth the United States, its policies and the President of the United States. I mean, these guys ought to, I don’t know, resign.” In the same vein, Weekend Edition Saturday host Scott Simon–who was an antiwar activist at the University of Chicago in the Vietnam era–wrote a swaggering essay for the Wall Street Journal editorial page on October 11, 2001, titled “Even Pacifists Must Support This War,” and, in a March 2003 speech in Seattle, he reportedly expressed support for the US invasion of Iraq.

A third group of critics takes issue not so much with NPR’s political orientation but with its monotonal sound quality; its often bland and homogeneous programming; its lack of aural experimentation; and its diminished cultural coverage–which, they note, was an integral part of NPR’s founding mission. These critics, many of whom work in the world of public radio, lament that on the road to becoming a “primary news provider” NPR has neglected its original mission to provide a wide array of top-notch, eclectic cultural programming. (They note, as evidence of NPR’s bias against innovative, artistic fare, that the network turned down two of public radio’s most popular programs–Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion and Ira Glass’s This American Life, both of which found a home at rival distributors.)

“The notion that we are turning away from culture is not correct,” says Klose, who cites programs like Performance Today, Jazz Profiles and a recent eight-part series on the state of regional theater as evidence of NPR’s cultural vitality. Klose is right: Valuable cultural fare continues to flow from NPR. But the numbers show that news is clearly seen as more important: In 2002 NPR spent $41 million on news and information, and only $7 million on cultural and entertainment programming.

“The NPR drone” is how some staffers describe the network’s overall sound, and many NPR watchers concur with that description. “If you listen to a lot of NPR,” Brian Montopoli averred in The Washington Monthly in 2003, “you realize how similar it all sounds: no matter who is talking, or what they are talking about.” Writing in the New York Times in 1998, Greil Marcus took blistering aim at NPR’s leading hosts and newscasters, and wondered why, year after year, their work imparts a sense of “boredom with the world.”

Klose takes issue with the notion that NPR is bland, detached and formulaic: “I think it’s an urban myth,” he says. “It’s an armchair cavil that has no basis in fact.” But at least one distinguished former NPR employee has a view closer to that of the critics. Two years ago Robert Krulwich, who many consider to be the network’s finest correspondent from the late 1970s and early ’80s, issued a blunt critique of NPR’s programming–and, by implication, its audience–at a staff retreat. According to the notes of a staff member who was present at the talk, Krulwich made the following points:

Politesse. NPR desires to be polite, to maintain dignity. It doesn’t challenge its sources or interviewees. There is room for reporters to stiffen when they hear a lie and poke back.

Scared of audience. The habits of your audience shouldn’t be your habit. NPR writes too much for our expected listeners. We should disturb the audience occasionally. Tell them what they don’t already know and what they don’t want to hear.

No joy. A mature organization grows accustomed to itself. NPR has lost the willingness to play. You don’t hear much that makes you laugh or as many tears. Too much in the mind. NPR needs more people who scream, suffer; people who are playing.

Might the Kroc money, by providing NPR with a solid financial cushion, pave the way for more quirky, spontaneous and risky programming? Says Susan Stamberg: “The Kroc money, actually, will probably reduce the quirk level even more, because with it we can pay for more and more sober reporters out in the field.”

One subject on which the critics agree is that NPR can do much more to reach nonwhite listeners. In the 1980s audience research data urged public radio stations to concentrate on a specific type of well-educated, self-motivated individual. According to Jack Mitchell’s Listener Supported, that data boiled down to the following: “success for public radio meant having great appeal to a subset of the population and none at all to the vast majority of the population.” This helps to explain why nine out of ten NPR listeners are white. And these facts form the backdrop to Tavis Smiley’s dispute with NPR. (It has to be said that the reasons behind Smiley’s divorce from NPR remain murky: On one side is his assertion that NPR wasn’t doing enough to promote the show. But NPR, which rushed to create a new black-oriented show hosted by Ed Gordon, claims that Smiley insisted on a $3 million promotional budget for his show, when its entire advertising budget is less than $200,000.)

In any case, some station managers saw Smiley’s show as a vital bridge to nonwhite audiences, and they regret its disappearance from NPR’s airwaves. One station manager in a major metropolitan market recalls a series of focus groups composed of African-American and Hispanic adults who had never before listened to public radio. He notes that they reacted indifferently to nearly all of the programming on his station–except for Smiley’s show, whose energy and verve fully captured their attention.

“There is a belief out there that NPR has no interest in reaching African-Americans and Hispanics,” says Maxie Jackson, program director of WETA in Washington, DC. “I don’t believe that. I firmly believe that they would love to increase the audience of people of color for public radio programming. That is also true of Public Radio International and the other program suppliers. The problem lies in the fact that none of them have the research, the research budget, the marketing expertise and the communication strategy expertise to do that…. The biggest and fundamental issue at hand here is that none of these organizations have reached out to people of color in the past. None of them know how to do it.”

Critics who wish to see NPR move in a more progressive direction are likely to be disappointed. At the moment, NPR’s center of gravity is in the middle of the spectrum. Twenty-eight percent of NPR listeners, according to an internal document, consider themselves either “very conservative” or “somewhat conservative.” Thirty-two percent defined themselves as “somewhat liberal” or “very liberal.” But 29 percent chose the category “middle of the road.” Given this data, NPR executives will no doubt play it safe in the years to come.

Indeed, the economic structure of public radio more or less guarantees a centrist editorial formula. Less than 2 percent of NPR’s budget consists of funds from the taxpayer-funded CPB. (In the 1970s NPR received 90 percent of its budget from the CPB.) But the member stations, which in some sense “own” NPR, and on which NPR relies for much of its additional revenue, receive a hefty 12.7 percent of their budget from the CPB. To compensate for diminishing federal support, NPR has been forced to rely on corporations and foundations. In 2002, the last year for which data are easily accessible, NPR accepted $250,000 or more from each of the following corporate “underwriters”: Procter & Gamble, Sodexho, Microsoft, Saab, Citibank and the Liberty Mutual Insurance Company. Wal-Mart became an underwriter in 2004. Both NPR and Wal-Mart refuse to disclose the dollar amount. A public radio system that is substantially dependent on corporations will not, in all likelihood, produce a new generation of I.F. Stones, Jessica Mitfords and Sy Hershes to investigate chicanery in corporate America.

If it is relatively easy to discern NPR’s (and public radio’s) aversion to political risk-taking, it’s somewhat more difficult to explain its resistance to freshening up its programming along the lines suggested by critics who crave innovative, sound-rich fare. NPR staffers interviewed for this article point a finger at NPR management in general and two sober executives in particular: Bruce Drake, the vice president of news and information, and Barbara Rehm, managing editor. Before coming to NPR, Drake worked at the New York Daily News for twenty-one years. Rehm is a ten-year veteran of the Daily News, after which she spent four years in the early 1990s at Voice of America. Staffers describe them as bureaucrats who possess a narrow political and cultural imagination. For years Drake has opposed the creation of an investigative unit, and NPR is currently without one.

Last May NPR hired, as a second managing editor, the highly regarded editor of the Baltimore Sun, Bill Marimow, who was fired from the newspaper after he raised one too many complaints about the Tribune Company’s inexorable quest for high quarterly profits at its Baltimore property. Marimow, who won two Pulitzer Prizes for stories about police brutality, has overseen the creation of a number of new beats and staff positions, and he is pushing his reporters to do more investigative reporting and hard-hitting journalism. His main accomplishment so far is an award-winning series by Daniel Zwerdling that documented brutality against immigrants at New Jersey detention facilities. But NPR sources anticipate future discord between Drake and Marimow.

Regardless of what Marimow does, NPR’s political reporting will undoubtedly remain relatively bland and cautious. But in a rapidly changing media landscape, it’s not at all obvious that a play-it-safe editorial formula will enable NPR to prosper. The average listener is 50 years old and white. Down the road, will younger listeners embrace the polite reporting model that NPR currently adheres to? Possibly. But it’s also possible that they will opt for tastier, more opinionated fare on the Internet or satellite radio, especially now that “podcasting,” a way of posting audio content online, allows listeners to create their own radio menus.

One way, perhaps, for NPR to confront the challenge is by re-examining the values of its original mission statement, which called for interpretation (in contrast to strict adherence to “hard news” reporting), artistic innovation and gutsy investigative reporting. That approach points toward a journalism that pokes back at lies with outrage and indignation, and programming that is pungent, offbeat and passionate–qualities that NPR’s competitors, Public Radio International and American Public Media, have brought to bear with outfits like the American RadioWorks documentary unit, and shows like Marketplace, This American Life, To the Point and The World (and as independent producers David Isay and Joe Richman have done on NPR itself).

What might fresher programming sound like? Ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin, who is one of NPR’s more incisive critics, points to an All Things Considered documentary by Noah Adams on the origins of the civil rights song “We Shall Overcome.” “As he traced the roots of the song,” Dvorkin explains, “and how it so powerfully affected people, the documentary went live to Spelman College in Atlanta, where the school choir performed it straight into All Things Considered on Martin Luther King’s birthday…. It showed the true power of radio and NPR at its best.”

But change won’t be easy, according to Bill Buzenberg, who was vice president of news and information at NPR from 1990 to 1997 and is now senior vice president of news at American Public Media. “NPR has a fear of doing kick-ass journalism at the highest level,” he says. “They’re not hungry enough.”

New York City

In his attempt to “play fair” Scott Sherman appears to have learned his journalistic ethics from the New York Sun‘s Jacob Gershman [“The Mideast Comes to Columbia,” April 4]. Even the mainstream New York Times showed more journalistic professionalism in its coverage of the Columbia University witchhunt when it refused to engage in the kind of baseless character assassination in which Sherman engages.

Without providing a shred of evidence for his profile, Sherman describes me, among other things, as “dogmatic” and as “a man who traffics in absolutes, a man who often infuriates even those who are sympathetic to his views.” It is unclear how Sherman knows any of this. Has he spoken to all “those who are sympathetic to my views”? Did they all tell him that I often infuriate them? What are the signs of my dogmatism? How can one even begin to respond to such yellow journalism?

But as if this were not enough, Sherman adds that Edward Said “worried about his young friend’s propensity for careless rhetoric–a point that Massad himself acknowledged in his Al-Ahram obituary of Said.”

In fact, I acknowledged no such thing, as neither I nor Edward Said believed that my rhetoric was “careless.” Said was merely concerned about strategy and about my “youthful enthusiasm” (as he termed it) in criticizing certain enemies of the Palestinian struggle, not any alleged carelessness. Sherman’s purpose for such baseless descriptions is for Nation readers to dismiss my political views as akin to Daniel Pipes’s and Martin Kramer’s in their extremism, as he presents me as their mirror image. Sherman concludes: “Massad frequently acts out the [‘devil’] role by unleashing a steady stream of inflammatory anti-Zionist rhetoric: ‘racist Jewish state’ is a locution he constantly employs.”

My characterization of Israel as racist is not some ideological insult but rather a description of a country that has myriad laws that grant Jewish citizens rights and privileges that it denies to non-Jewish citizens. These include the Law of Return (1950), the Law of Absentee Property (1950), the Law of the State’s Property (1951), the Law of Citizenship (1952), the Status Law (1952), the Israel Lands Administration Law (1960), the Construction and Building Law (1951) and myriad others.

This racist character of the country extends to the maintenance of the exclusive Jewish symbolism that Israel deploys, ranging from its Jewish flag and national anthem (which speaks only of Jews) to its ceremonial national days and the practices of institutionalized discrimination against its Arab non-Jewish citizens in every facet of life. I am not sure why Sherman finds this “inflammatory.” Would calling the United States during segregation or South Africa during apartheid racist countries also be considered “inflammatory” anti-American or anti-South African rhetoric?

Unfortunately, in his political biases against defenders of the Palestinian struggle, Sherman does not deviate from the historic stance of The Nation itself, which in its editorial of September 27, 1993, expressed its enthusiastic support for the now-defunct Oslo Accords and cautioned against “extremists” on both sides who opposed it (let us recall that Edward Said was one of the major opponents of Oslo and that he was no “extremist”), warning Israel that unless it satisfies Palestinian aspirations, the Palestinian victims might very well become Nazis and threaten nonracist Israel: “we should recall how the harsh Versailles settlement imposed on Germany after World War I paved the way for Nazi ultranationalism, racist perversions and militarism. The bitter ironies of such a comparison should encourage Israel and its friends, especially the United States, to satisfy Palestinian aspirations for real independence and sovereign rights.”

If Sherman and The Nation are the best that American left journalism has to offer, I will take my chances with the Sun.

JOSEPH MASSAD
Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures Department, Columbia University

New York City

I thought Scott Sherman’s research thorough and his article well written and in general good, but I found his description of Joseph Massad as “strident, dogmatic, proud, deliberately provocative and utterly uncompromising” an unnecessary and unfortunate personal attack. Massad deserves a better exposé of his excellent scholarship, research and teaching. Sherman mentions his writings but does not say anything about their contents and the interesting ideas discussed in Massad’s books.

My late husband, Edward Said, thought highly of his work, as evidenced by the blurb he wrote regarding his book on Jordan. Also, before this controversy erupted, Massad’s class was very popular at Columbia. Many students who took the course thought the material was challenging and provocative. The class was ranked very highly by the students who took the course, and Massad was nominated for the Van Doren Prize. Why is this fact never mentioned by the media while what gets quoted is only what the attackers wrote?

MARIAM C. SAID

New York City

Scott Sherman’s article is one of the few reliable journalistic accounts of the systematic campaign conducted against my university over the last three years. Sherman’s account is reliable in part because the principal targets of this campaign, to which two of my MEALAC colleagues and I are now subjected, had been given an opportunity to respond to Sherman’s repeated and prolonged queries.

It is therefore exceedingly disappointing to see that after weeks of detailed conversations and extensive e-mail exchanges, Sherman still manages to add yet another layer of insult to injury. Writing of the deceitful and slanderous misrepresentation of my travelogue to Palestine by the Goliath Project, Sherman states:

“Dabashi misses the point. What’s troubling about the passage is its sweeping characterization of an entire people–“Israeli Jews” or not–as vulgar and domineering in their very essence. The passage can easily be construed as anti-Semitic. Dabashi, at a minimum, is guilty of shrill and careless writing. In panning for gold, his critics discovered a precious nugget, one that he would do well to disown.”

As I repeatedly explained to Sherman, if characterization X is attributed to varied people caught in conditions A, B and C, then by logical conclusion none of these people are essentially characterized, but their common condition analytically diagnosed. The passage in question is not a “sweeping characterization of an entire people”; it is a reading of a people’s body politics when trapped in a systematically militarized state apparatus. Dabashi does not miss the point. Sherman confuses the premise.

If I were to say that people sitting in a room cannot see properly because the light is dim, or cannot hear well because there is construction next door, or cannot clap their hands enthusiastically because the room temperature is very cold and their hands are in their pockets, I am reading their body language not as quintessential to their presumed race but as the bodily reflection of their material condition, namely the room in which they are sitting. Change their room and all those bodily signs will disappear, and they will see, hear and applaud perfectly well. This is elementary logic.

Failing to understand that, and then accusing me of “shrill” writing at a time when from Boston to Philadelphia, from New York to Jerusalem, and from the United States to Israel, militant mobs like the one organized at Columbia Business School; multimillion-dollar establishments like Hillel at Columbia; complicitous presidents like Bollinger and Shapiro, supported by their boards of trustees and militant millionaire clubs among the Columbia and Barnard alumni; advocates of torture like Alan Dershowitz; racist propagandists like Daniel Pipes; anti-intellectual vigilantes like Martin Kramer; organized cells at Columbia medical, business and law schools; a bagful of tabloids in Manhattan; Jack-the-Ripper journalists like Douglas Feiden and Jacob Gershman; a deceitful propaganda machine like the Goliath Project; a minister and his ministry in Israel; city, state and federal politicians seeking higher office here in the United States are all ganging up and calling for the heads of two Arabs and a Muslim in post-9/11 New York is quite an achievement for The Nation, one that I will not forget or forgive.

HAMID DABASHI
Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies, Columbia University

New York City

Thank you for the recent series of articles concerning unfounded allegations against Columbia professors by right-wing, anti-Palestinian organizations. While we strongly agree with most of these articles’ conclusions, we reject Scott Sherman’s assertion that a passage written by Professor Hamid Dabashi and quoted in the film Columbia Unbecoming could “easily be construed as anti-Semitic.”

The film, produced by the neoconservative David Project, misquotes Dabashi by deceptively inserting the phrase “Israeli Jews” into a passage he wrote that is critical of Israel. As Sherman indicates, Dabashi never used the phrase “Israeli Jews” in his quoted essay, “For a Fistful of Dust.”

In fact, Dabashi refers to Israel only as a military occupier, not as a Jewish state. Dabashi neither states nor implies that Israeli behavior is inherent to Jews, nor does he claim that Israelis are innate oppressors because of their biology. Instead he argues that a militarized, systematically oppressive society has fused to the souls of Israelis to the point of penetrating every aspect of their being. This cannot, in any way, be taken as an extension of the traditional anti-Semitic canard that Jews are biologically inferior or different.

Of course, all generalizations about a people are, to a certain extent, simplifications and inaccurate. The oppression of the Palestinian people is anathema to many Israelis, some of whom have expressed views similar to Dabashi’s. As former speaker of the Israeli Knesset and Labor Party leader Avraham Burg has written, “The disease eating away at the body of Zionism has already attacked the head.”

JEWS AGAINST THE OCCUPATION
http://www.jatonyc.org (12 signatories)

WOMEN OF A CERTAIN AGE
(12 signatories)

5 OTHER SIGNATORIES

New York City

Scott Sherman’s article about Columbia offers a welcome contrast to the horrifyingly, almost psychotically, biased editorial offered up by the New York Times. Unlike whatever blind assassin the Times was calling on, Sherman listens carefully to both sides and with genuine professionalism tries hard–some would say too hard–to give the student complainants their due. As a result, he at least is fully “credible” when he suggests that the accusations against the MEALAC professors did not amount to true grievances and that the idea of Columbia as a place that’s uncomfortable for Jews or Zionists is a complete fantasy. He sees that the real story here is the deliberate intrusion into the university by pro-Israel advocacy groups and the inadequacy of Columbia’s defense of its faculty. There are things about which one wishes more had been said, like the value of Joseph Massad’s scholarship or the student who pilfered Rashid Khalidi’s correspondence and gave it to the Sun. But for these and other matters there will be time, alas, as the Sun and its murky allies have certainly not finished with their mudslinging. I hope Sherman will stay on the case.

BRUCE ROBBINS
Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University

SHERMAN REPLIES

Brooklyn, NY

Joseph Massad’s letter reinforces the characterization of him in my article: He is a man who favors rigid thinking and coarse rhetoric, a man who cannot tolerate even the slightest difference with his point of view. In researching my piece about the controversy at Columbia, I interviewed more than sixty students, faculty and alumni, many of whom have had extensive contact with Massad from the time of his arrival at Columbia.

My description of Massad as “strident, dogmatic, proud, deliberately provocative and utterly uncompromising in his defense of the Palestinian struggle” was not intended as a “personal attack.” That description emerged both from my reporting and from my own reading of Massad’s written work, especially, but not limited to, the rough-edged articles he has written for the Egyptian daily Al-Ahram, which can be easily accessed on that paper’s website. I invite Nation readers to peruse those articles and come to their own conclusions. I have no doubt that his first book, on Jordanian national identity, is written in a more measured tone, as befits a young professor seeking tenure at a top institution.

My statement about Edward Said’s misgivings about Massad’s rhetorical style was based on a conversation with an unimpeachable source who was extremely close to Said; that person wishes to remain anonymous. In her letter, Mariam Said does not deny that Edward Said expressed dismay about Massad’s use of language.

Since my article went to press, Columbia’s ad hoc faculty committee, consisting of five distinguished professors–Ira Katznelson, Mark Mazower, Lisa Anderson, Farah Griffin and Jean Howard–has issued its much-awaited report on the controversy. The report concluded that the primary accusation against Massad–that he lashed out at a student named Deena Shanker during an acrimonious classroom debate–is “credible”: “Upon extensive deliberation,” the report noted, “the committee finds it credible that Professor Massad became angered at a question that he understood to countenance Israeli conduct of which he disapproved, and that he responded heatedly. While we have no reason to believe that Professor Massad intended to expel Ms. Shanker from the classroom…his rhetorical response to her query exceeded commonly accepted bounds by conveying that her question merited harsh public criticism.” Quoting from The Faculty Handbook of Columbia University, the report went on to say that “angry criticism directed at a student in class because she disagrees, or appears to disagree, with a faculty member on a matter of substance is not consistent with the obligation ‘to show respect for the rights of others to hold opinions differing from their own,’ to exercise ‘responsible self-discipline,’ and to ‘demonstrate appropriate restraint.'”

Regarding Massad, the report also noted: “A significant number of students found Professor Massad to be an excellent and inspiring teacher, and several described his class as the best they took at Columbia. But even some of the students who found the class valuable noted Professor Massad’s repeated deployment of a tendentious and highly charged vocabulary, and some complained about what they felt was his repeated, even unremitting, use of stigmatizing characterizations and his sometimes intemperate response to dissenting views. Some reported that they were deterred from asking questions by the atmosphere this created.”

Given these findings, I see no reason to retreat from my original description of Joseph Massad.

SCOTT SHERMAN

In December 2003 Rabbi Charles Sheer, the director of the Columbia/Barnard chapter of Hillel, the Jewish campus organization, dispatched an e-bulletin to alumni, students and supporters. There was much to report: In 2002 a movement of students and professors had urged Columbia to divest from companies that manufactured and sold weaponry to Israel. In the end, Rabbi Sheer had vanquished the prodivestment forces with a well-executed campaign that garnered 33,000 signatures. “There have not been any major divestment campaigns on any US campus, and almost no anti-Israel student-initiated activity–speakers, films or demonstrations–on our campus,” Sheer noted with pride. “That’s the good news.” The bad news? “The battleground regarding the Middle East at Columbia University has shifted to the classroom.” Rabbi Sheer was mainly referring to classrooms in a single department–Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC)–and he hinted that a counterstrike against MEALAC was in the making: “A student group,” he wrote, “is currently working on a video that records how intimidated students feel by advocacy teaching….”

Ten months later the New York Sun, a small but influential conservative daily, broke the story of the video Sheer was referring to. The film, the Sun noted, “consists of interviews with several students who contend that they have felt threatened academically for expressing a pro-Israel point of view in classrooms.” Titled Columbia Unbecoming, the film was produced by the David Project, a shadowy, Boston-based group that has ties to the Israel on Campus Coalition, an organization whose members include the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the American Jewish Committee.

Over the next five months the Sun ran dozens of rough-edged stories about developments pertaining to the film, many of which appeared under the tagline “Crisis at Columbia.” The paper also hammered the university in a series of editorials: “The Education Department recently indicated it will expand its enforcement activities in respect of campus anti-semitism,” the Sun averred on November 19. “Our reporting suggests that eventually federal authorities will have to get involved at Columbia.” Other local papers echoed the Sun‘s reporting. On November 21 the Daily News published a “special report” headlined “Poison Ivy: Climate of Hate Rocks Columbia University,” in which the paper proclaimed, “Dozens of academics are said to be promoting an I-hate-Israel agenda, embracing the ugliest of Arab propaganda, and teaching that Zionism is the root of all evil in the Mideast.” Similar sentiments appeared on the editorial pages of the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal, in the Village Voice (under the byline of Nat Hentoff) and on Fox News.

Local politicians, too, rushed into the fray: In late October US Representative Anthony Weiner, a Democrat who is running for mayor, wrote to Columbia president Lee Bollinger, demanding that he fire Joseph Massad, one of the professors assailed in the film, for “his displays of anti-Semitism.”

The MEALAC professors singled out by Columbia Unbecoming–Joseph Massad, Hamid Dabashi and George Saliba–did not cower before the allegations. “This witch-hunt,” Massad declared in a furious riposte, “aims to stifle pluralism, academic freedom, and the freedom of expression on university campuses in order to ensure that only one opinion is permitted, that of uncritical support for the state of Israel.”

Dabashi, for his part, greeted the controversy with a mixture of indignation and melancholy. He was born in Iran, and has lived in the United States since 1976. “This is not the face of the United States that I can any longer recognize,” Dabashi said recently. “This is not the country to which I immigrated and chose to call home more than a quarter of a century ago–a place where my political heroes lived, people I grew up admiring: Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Ralph Ellison, Rosa Parks, Stanley Kubrick, Ella Fitzgerald. How in such a short time could the face of a nation and the promise of its hopes change so radically, so unrecognizably?”

The current battle at Columbia is the latest salvo in a larger, post-9/11 conflict concerning Middle East studies on campus. In late 2003 the House of Representatives passed HR 3077. The bill, which languished in a Senate committee, mandated that area studies programs that receive federal funding under Title VI of the Higher Education Act must “foster debate on American foreign policy from diverse perspectives.” HR 3077 sent a chill through many scholars of the Middle East. “This bill represented an unprecedented degree of intrusion by the federal government into what goes on in our classrooms and in our universities,” says Zachary Lockman, chair of the department of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at New York University.

An intellectual architect of HR 3077 was Martin Kramer, who, along with Daniel Pipes, has taken it upon himself to police and patrol the discipline of Middle East studies. Kramer is the author of Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America (2001), a senior associate of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University and an indefatigable polemicist and critic. Since Columbia Unbecoming was first screened this past October, Kramer has been especially vituperative in his attacks on Massad, MEALAC and even president Bollinger. (In late January Kramer averred that Columbia’s president “should have to jump through a hundred more hoops” before the MEALAC matter can be settled.) Pipes runs his own think tank, the Middle East Forum, which in 2002 launched Campus Watch, whose mission is to critique and harass liberal and progressive scholars of the Arab world [see Eyal Press, “Neocon Man,” May 10, 2004]. The current developments at Columbia are deeply satisfying to Kramer and Pipes: A few months ago Harvard Magazine asked Pipes to delineate Campus Watch’s recent accomplishments, and he replied, “Pressuring Columbia University to the point that the president has organized a committee [to investigate] political intimidation in the classroom.”

The creation of that committee, which consists of five Columbia faculty members, would not have occurred without Columbia Unbecoming. But one can’t easily speak of “the film,” since a number of different versions exist. Columbia students close to the debate maintain there are at least six versions. The film has never been released to the public, but it has been selectively screened for Columbia administrators, trustees, students and journalists. This magazine requested a copy from the David Project and was repeatedly rebuffed. I finally saw one version of the film in its entirety at a packed campus screening in late January. What’s clear is that Columbia Unbecoming is a propaganda film: one that portrays Jewish students as “silenced” by professors who “criticize Israel and…question its legitimacy”; in which vague and anonymous accusations are tossed about by students whose faces are sometimes blurred and whose voices are sometimes masked; which deliberately conflates what instructors say in the classroom with what they publish and do outside the classroom; and which attributes sinister motives to Columbia administrators and faculty, not one of whom is given the opportunity to respond to the allegations.

Columbia Unbecoming is a source of anguish and embarrassment to some prominent members of the university’s Jewish community. Robert Pollack is a professor of biological sciences, a former dean of the university’s Columbia College and a man who was instrumental in raising $13 million for the construction of the Kraft Center, a six-story building that is now the permanent home of Columbia’s Jewish community. (Much of Columbia Unbecoming was shot in the Kraft Center.) “This building is a gift of the American Jewish community in its fullest happiness,” says Pollack. “One must wonder: Why would a video like this be made in a building like that?” Pollack is no great admirer of MEALAC, and he clashed with Columbia’s Edward Said over the Israel-Palestine conflict, but he has no patience for the view that the university is hostile to Jewish students: “It is a crazy, crazy exaggeration to claim that Jews are under attack at Columbia or that the faculty is anti-Semitic.” And he is caustic about Columbia Unbecoming: “No one has seen the video,” says Pollack. “There is no video to see. There’s a cloud of videos constantly changing. It’s innuendo and gossip.”

Nevertheless, Columbia Unbecoming does lodge a specific set of allegations against MEALAC in general and Saliba, Dabashi and Massad in particular–allegations that have traveled far and wide, including to Israel, where the film has been screened.

George Saliba, a professor of Arabic and Islamic sciences, has taught at Columbia since 1978. In the film a student describes a heated discussion with Saliba outside of class about the Israel-Palestine conflict. She claims he said: “You have no voice in this debate…you have green eyes…you’re not a Semite…I’m a Semite…I have brown eyes. You have no claim to the land of Israel.” In late October Saliba obtained a transcript of the film from the New York Sun and dispatched a statement to the Columbia Spectator, the campus newspaper. “The statements that she attributes to me in the transcript, marked between quotations, are blatantly false,” Saliba wrote, “and I can say in good conscience, and categorically, that I would not have used such phrases.” (Saliba also noted that the student received a very respectable grade for the class. Indeed, none of the students in the film have charged that their grades have suffered because of their political views.)

In its treatment of Hamid Dabashi, the David Project has neglected his academic scholarship on Iranian cinema, culture and politics. Instead, the film leans heavily on a single passage lifted from a recent essay he wrote for the Egyptian publication Al-Ahram, titled “For a Fistful of Dust: A Passage to Palestine.” The following words from the essay appear in the film: “Half a century of systematic maiming and murdering of another people has left…its deep marks on the faces of the Israeli Jews, the way they talk, walk, the way they greet each other…. There is a vulgarity of character that is bone-deep and structural to the skeletal vertebrae of its culture.”

Dabashi correctly insists that the David Project mangled the quote–inserting the phrase “Israeli Jews” where he had “these people”–and took the entire passage out of context. (The context was his description of a five-hour ordeal in Ben Gurion Airport, during which time Dabashi was searched and detained by Israeli security officials.) “The phrase ‘Israeli Jews’ never ever appears in that entire essay. That is not my vocabulary,” he says. “I was referring to citizens of a militarized state, both its victims and its victimizers. I could have written that passage about Americans in Iraq or Janjaweed in Darfur.” Maybe so, but Dabashi misses the point. What’s troubling about the passage is its sweeping characterization of an entire people–“Israeli Jews” or not–as vulgar and domineering in their very essence. The passage can easily be construed as anti-Semitic. Dabashi, at a minimum, is guilty of shrill and careless writing. In panning for gold, his critics discovered a precious nugget, one that he would do well to disown.

Dabashi, however, sees himself as a victim–of Campus Watch, of the David Project, of American xenophobia and nativism. In June 2002 Daniel Pipes co-wrote a piece in the New York Post titled “Extremists on Campus,” which lashed Massad and Dabashi. Returning to New York from a trip to Japan, Dabashi says, he found his voice mail overflowing with bile: “Hey, Mr. Dabashi,” said one caller. “I read about you in today’s New York Post. You stinking, terrorist Muslim pig.”

Finally, there is the case against Joseph Massad, whom the film calls “one of the most dangerous intellectuals” on campus. One senses that he is the real target of Columbia’s internal and external critics. Massad, a Palestinian, earned his doctorate in political science from Columbia, where he developed a close relationship with Edward Said. In 1999 Massad was given an assistant professorship in MEALAC, and he is up for tenure in two years. (His scholarly output would seem to make him a viable candidate: Massad’s first book, on Jordanian national identity, was published by Columbia University Press. His second, Desiring Arabs, is forthcoming from Harvard.)

For Pipes & Co., Massad is something of a gift: He is strident, dogmatic, proud, deliberately provocative and utterly uncompromising in his defense of the Palestinian struggle. He is a man who traffics in absolutes, a man who often infuriates even those who are sympathetic to his views. Said worried about his young friend’s propensity for careless rhetoric–a point that Massad himself acknowledged in his Al-Ahram obituary of Said: “He would caution (actually yell at) me against giving way to my ‘youthful’ enthusiasm in a world in which we have few friends and numerous enemies.” Massad is a ferocious critic of Israel and Zionism, but he is also withering on the subject of the PLO and the Palestinian Authority. (He supports a single, binational state.) To his detractors he is a devil figure, a “dangerous intellectual.” Massad frequently acts out the role by unleashing a steady stream of inflammatory anti-Zionist rhetoric: “racist Jewish state” is a locution he constantly employs.

Columbia Unbecoming lodges two main accusations against Massad. The first concerns an alleged exchange that took place with a Jewish student, Tomy Schoenfeld, at an off-campus lecture that Massad delivered in 2002. Schoenfeld says he raised his hand and tried to question Massad, who, upon learning that he had served in the Israeli military, shot back, “How many Palestinians have you killed?” Massad denies the allegation: “Tomy Schoenfeld was never my student. I have never met him in any setting.”

The second allegation concerns an incident that took place in April 2002, at the time of an Israeli assault on the Jenin refugee camp, in Massad’s Palestinian-Israeli Politics & Societies class. A Barnard student, Deena Shanker–who does not appear in the film; her story is told by someone else–claims that in an acrimonious classroom discussion, she told Massad that Israel provides civilians with advance warning of impending attacks. She says he erupted with these words: “If you’re going to deny the atrocities being committed against the Palestinian people then you can get out of my classroom!” Massad denies this charge as well. As he told the Jerusalem Post on December 24, “I have never asked and would never ask any of my students to leave my class no matter what their comments and questions were.” Shanker stands by her account, and cites two corroborating witnesses, only one of whom was officially registered in the class that semester, though both were in the room that day. Massad has insisted that his classes include unregistered individuals and auditors who he believes are there to heckle him and monitor his teaching.

Nader Uthman, a MEALAC and Center for Comparative Literature & Society doctoral student who was Massad’s teaching assistant that semester, says, “In Massad’s class, the most prolific contributors to class discussion were students who disagreed with him, and many did not hesitate to interrupt him to make their point.” Did Massad, on the tumultuous day in question, threaten to kick Shanker out of the room? Says Uthman, “To my recollection that never happened.” Benjamin Bishop, who was present as a grad student that day, reinforces that view. “I have serious doubts about the allegation that Massad told a student to leave the class,” says Bishop. “I don’t have any memory of that.”

Of all the allegations in the film, Shanker’s is the most serious; threatening to throw a student out of class would certainly be a violation of professional ethics. The facts concerning what happened that day are murky, but the following can be discerned: On one side was a Palestinian professor who is an unyielding critic of the Israeli government. On the other was a Jewish student who, with Jenin in ruins, mounted an unapologetic defense of the Israeli military with facts she says she heard on CNN. If the faculty committee determines that Shanker’s account is correct, Massad’s transgression, though certainly reprehensible, would hardly justify the overriding thesis of Columbia Unbecoming: that pro-Israel students are systematically silenced by professors in MEALAC. Shanker herself insists that MEALAC is “a really wonderful department, for the most part.” She believes that Columbia’s Jewish community is too religious, and she has come to value MEALAC’s secularism. “I definitely feel safer in the MEALAC department as a Jew than I do at a religious Columbia Jewish event,” she says.

The roots of the Columbia conflict can be traced back to campus political developments in 2001 and early 2002. In March 2002 a network of national Jewish organizations met to evaluate what they saw as an alarming rise in anti-Israel activity on campus. From those meetings emerged the Israel on Campus Coalition (ICC), which is a partnership of Hillel and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation. (The three organizations share a building in Washington.) According to a 2002 article for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, a Jewish-oriented news service, top-flight talent was brought in to advise the ICC and assemble a battle plan. “Pro-Israel professionals from the elite consulting firm McKinsey & Company offered pro-bono services,” the article noted. Those professionals created a document for the ICC arguing that “the primary goal for this year should be to ‘take back the campus’ by influencing public opinion through lectures, the Internet and coalitions.” The ICC–which recently received a $1,050,000 grant from the Schusterman Foundation, and whose speakers list includes Daniel Pipes–has an impressive array of “members”: AIPAC, ADL, Americans for Peace Now and the Zionist Organization of America, among others.

The ICC has a single “affiliate member”: the David Project. The David Project is led by Charles Jacobs, who is a co-founder of CAMERA, the pro-Israel media watchdog group; the founder of the American Anti-Slavery Group, which calls itself “America’s leading human rights group dedicated to abolishing modern day slavery worldwide”; and, along with Richard Perle, Charles Krauthammer and Bill Kristol, among others, a member of the board of advisers of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. The ICC’s website lists a number of “regional ICCs” that receive “strategic advice and guidance” from the Washington headquarters. The regional ICC representative in New York is none other than Rachel Fish, the director of the David Project’s New York office. Jacobs was tight-lipped in a recent interview: He refused to provide details about his financial backers, referring only to unnamed “individuals and foundations”; and he declined to elaborate on the extent to which the David Project receives tactical advice from professional pro-Israel lobbyists and operatives allied with the ICC.

What can easily be determined is that in October 2003, the David Project met with Columbia students and agreed to provide funding for a film that would give voice to their complaints. Rabbi Sheer, who ran Columbia’s Kraft Center, gave his blessing: Sheer was already a fierce critic of MEALAC, having collided, over the previous two years, with both Dabashi and Saliba.

In April 2002 Dabashi and several other professors spoke at a campus demonstration against the Israeli incursions into the occupied territories. Rabbi Sheer was upset by the event–the speeches, he later noted, were “sadly reminiscent of the kind of speech one hears on Arab TV”–and complained to administrators about it. He also contacted Dabashi and requested the text of his remarks at the teach-in. Dabashi felt these actions were unnecessarily intrusive, coming as they did from a campus religious official, and thrashed the rabbi in an essay for the Columbia Spectator. (Saliba, in a separate letter to the paper, was also blunt: “Rabbi! Just preach! Do not even attempt to teach!”) Nine months later Dabashi organized a Palestinian film festival on campus, which again brought him into conflict with Sheer. Sheer left Columbia in 2004; Hillel sources insist that his departure had nothing to do with his support for the film. But Sheer evidently decided to bow out in pugilistic fashion: He has a starring role in the latest version of Columbia Unbecoming–a film, he now notes with regret in his voice, that has harmed Columbia’s reputation. Says Dabashi: “This film is his revenge on Columbia, and of course on MEALAC”–an opinion Sheer describes as “ludicrous.”

Since Sheer’s departure, the anti-MEALAC campaign has been energetically waged by a small group of undergraduates clustered around a charismatic 25-year-old student politician with shoulder-length hair named Ariel Beery, who is a veteran of the Israel Defense Forces. But other students have risen to MEALAC’s defense. One undergraduate, Eric Posner, who is also a former IDF member, collected pro-MEALAC testimony from twenty or so majors and gave the material to the investigating committee established by Columbia president Bollinger. One student said of Massad: “He always made clear the distinctions between Zionism and Judaism and was unrelenting in his criticism of anti-Semitism and anti-Semites.” Another student said of Dabashi: “He told me that he wasn’t even reading the accusations about him because he didn’t want to know which of his students might be talking about him or what they might be saying, for fear of being unable to treat them fairly.”

In July 2000 Edward Said, in a symbolic act of resistance, hurled a stone near the Lebanon-Israel border, an act that infuriated his detractors and led to calls for his dismissal from Columbia. In response, the then-provost of Columbia, Jonathan Cole, with the authorization of president George Rupp, issued a statement in defense of Said: “If we are to deny Professor Said the protection to write and speak freely, whose speech will next be suppressed and who will be the inquisitor who determines who should have a right to speak his or her mind without fear of retribution?” With that statement, many at Columbia believe, Cole honored himself and the best traditions of the university. “I felt it was important to defend Edward as soon as possible so that our position was clear and could not be misinterpreted,” Cole said recently. “Some on the outside did not like my statement, others applauded it, but it was, I believe, clear and unequivocal.”

Today, many Columbia faculty members believe that on the question of academic freedom, Lee Bollinger, one of the country’s pre-eminent scholars of the First Amendment and a man with a reputation as a liberal, has been rather less than clear and unequivocal. Bollinger did issue a press release on October 22 affirming that Columbia is “fully committed to upholding academic integrity and freedom of expression” and that the university “will not penalize faculty for statements made in public debate.” At the same time, however, Bollinger insisted that “academic freedom is not unlimited. It does not…extend to protecting behavior in the classroom that threatens or intimidates students for expressing their viewpoints or that uses the classroom as a means of political indoctrination.” In a recent interview, Bollinger came across as a beleaguered politician trying to locate and occupy the middle ground. “We must protect students,” he said, “just as we must protect faculty. We must live by our principles.”

Yet Bollinger has not spoken in a clear and decisive voice to the general public, or even to his own community. He did not respond publicly to Representative Weiner’s demand that Massad be fired; he seems unwilling to offer even a perfunctory defense of the MEALAC department; and he failed to confront and contest a torrent of tendentious information from four New York newspapers. The David Project and its supporters have orchestrated a media barrage of sustained intensity against Columbia. By not responding forcefully to that barrage, Bollinger has conveyed the impression that his institution is not equipped to handle the allegations, and that his faculty are fair game for partisan attacks.

“Columbia’s response has been a disaster,” says Robert Pollack. “People across the boundaries of all disagreement on Middle East issues agree that we don’t understand the silence.” The administration “made a mistake in adopting an agnostic posture at the outset, in using the word ‘investigate,'” says Columbia political scientist Andrew Nathan. “They should have said: ‘We have confidence in our faculty governance procedures. Deans and faculty committees regularly review the quality of faculty, curriculum, courses and teaching. We will protect them from outside pressure so they can do their job.'”

Those observing the controversy from outside Columbia are also perplexed by Bollinger’s behavior. “I really think Lee Bollinger has damaged every academic in the United States by his refusal to articulate a view on academic freedom,” says Stanley Katz, an expert on higher education at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School. “I don’t know how to construe his unwillingness to speak out, except to say that either he’s afraid to, or that he does not support academic freedom. I find both alternatives disappointing and unpleasant.”

It is widely assumed at Columbia that Bollinger is under considerable pressure from pro-Israel alumni, whose ire could complicate his fundraising goals, and that his caution is connected to political imperatives having to do with Columbia’s planned expansion into West Harlem–a $5 billion, thirty-year project on which Bollinger has staked much of his legacy. Bollinger is not eager to discuss these political imperatives, and he is currently awaiting the report of his faculty committee (whose members are maligned in the latest version of Columbia Unbecoming, partially on the grounds that two of them signed the 2002 divestment petition).

But the report, which is expected in late March, is unlikely to end the imbroglio. The coalition arrayed against Columbia seems increasingly confident and well organized. It has begun to campaign for an external body to investigate the charges, and has enlisted Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz and Village Voice journalist Nat Hentoff in that cause. Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer can barely contain their satisfaction: In televised remarks to his Columbia supporters on March 6, Kramer noted that the MEALAC controversy could mark “a turning point” in the ongoing campus ideological war over Middle East studies.

There are signs, however, that Columbia’s president is beginning to rouse himself: In late February Bollinger sent a powerful letter of protest on behalf of one of his top Middle East scholars, Rashid Khalidi, who was recently dismissed from a teacher-training program run by the New York City Department of Education on the grounds that he had made “past statements” critical of Israel. But Bollinger needs to go much further in confronting his critics. Asked about Martin Kramer’s assertion that he should have to jump through “a hundred more hoops,” Bollinger replied, “I have no doubt that some of the attacks on Columbia are ill motivated, and I have no respect for the purposes they are trying to achieve.” If Bollinger indeed feels that way, he should speak in a much louder voice about why the attacks on his institution are ill motivated; who precisely is behind those attacks; and what are the larger “purposes” those critics are trying to achieve. Five years ago, George Rupp and Jonathan Cole defended Columbia in a most eloquent and capable manner. Bollinger has yet to pass that test. Meanwhile, we haven’t heard the last of the David Project: The group has announced that it will produce other films about other campuses.*

NORTHERN EXPOSURE

Toronto

Thanks to Alisa Solomon for “War Resisters Go North” [Jan. 3], on Jeremy Hinzman’s application for refugee status in Canada. I am a Vietnam War resister at the War Resisters Support Campaign. Our goal is to convince the Canadian government to offer sanctuary to war resisters, as it did during the Vietnam War, when perhaps 60,000 of us came north. We believe that forcing war resisters to go through a drawn-out refugee process is inappropriate. US war resisters, after all, are conducting themselves exactly as Canada did in refusing to join the illegal Iraq War.

We are urging Canadians and Americans to help us pressure the Martin government to follow the example set by the Trudeau government, when war resisters were treated like other immigrants, not forced to submit refugee claims (www.resisters.ca).

LEE ZASLOFSKY

TORTURERS ‘R’ US

Bearsville, NY

Your January 3 lead editorial, “Prosecuting US Torture” (in Iraq) states, “the chain of evidence ends just a whisper away from Donald Rumsfeld.” A recently declassified memo signed by the Defense Secretary removes even the whisper. It shouts direct complicity, if not criminal culpability. In December 2002 Rumsfeld approved the request by Defense Department officials to permit all Category II interrogation techniques, which included forced nudity and the use of dogs, as well as deprivation of light and sound stimulation, isolation for thirty days, the use of head hoods, removal of religious items, forced hair shaving and twenty-hour interrogation sessions. Granted, this approval was for use on prisoners at Guantánamo, but as the guards migrated to Iraq, so did the techniques. A brief glance at the infamous Abu Ghraib photographs reveals nothing that did not have Rumsfeld’s prior approval; except, of course, the photos themselves.

ALAN SUSSMAN

KILLING WITH KINDNESS

Lincoln, Neb.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for Katha Pollitt’s “Subject to Debate” column about the Iraqi boy maimed by US cluster bombs, brought to the States for treatment and turned into a “feel good story” [Jan. 24]. Articles criticizing this war and the lies that have turned us into the good guys in this invasion/occupation are the exception rather than the rule. Every time the news reports two, four, ten Marines killed in Iraq, I think, “Why?” George W. Bush lied about every one of his reasons to send American troops to Iraq, and the country smiled stupidly and accepted it, even after the lies were shown to us. Just keep those magnetic ribbons on the SUVs. Bush should be facing impeachment rather than another four years.

JEFF D. SCHMID

KISSINGER AND TELL

Vienna, Va.

In “Kissinger’s Shadow Over the Council on Foreign Relations” [Dec. 27] Scott Sherman writes about a dispute among Kenneth Maxwell, the Council on Foreign Relations and the journal Foreign Affairs. Sherman includes the following quotation from an essay by Maxwell, who asserts: “Kissinger had sought to interfere before in Foreign Affairs during the editorship of his [James Hoge’s] predecessor William (“Bill”) Hyland. He [Hoge] said that he did not think that the breach that resulted between Kissinger and Hyland, who were old friends, had ‘ever been fully repaired.'”

This is dead wrong. First, Henry Kissinger never ever interfered with my editing of Foreign Affairs (1984-92). Second, there was never any “breach” between me and Henry Kissinger. We have remained good friends for over thirty years. We are still good friends.

WILLIAM G. HYLAND

SHERMAN REPLIES

Brooklyn, NY

William Hyland’s quarrel is not with Kenneth Maxwell or The Nation but with his successor at Foreign Affairs, James Hoge. It was Hoge, and not Maxwell, who expressed dismay about Kissinger’s interference at FA during Hyland’s editorship. Maxwell simply reproduced Hoge’s remark, which was uttered at a private meeting between the two men on January 30, 2004. Indeed, Hoge himself has not budged from his assertion: More than a month after the publication of Maxwell’s meticulously documented, 13,000-word paper, Hoge has yet to contest or deny a single fact in it, including the passage about Kissinger quoted in Hyland’s letter.

Scott Sherman

BEDFELLOWS OF 1956

Dover, NH

Patricia Williams’s evocation of E.B. White’s ode to his dog Fred [“Diary of a Mad Law Professor,” Dec. 27] comes, as Williams would tell you, from a 1956 New Yorker essay called “Bedfellows.” I’ve thought of that essay often this past year, in anguish. It begins, “I am lying here in my private sick bay…watching starlings from the vantage point of bed. Three Democrats are in bed with me: Harry Truman (in a stale copy of the Times), Adlai Stevenson (in Harper’s), and Dean Acheson (in a book called A Democrat Looks at His Party).” White goes on to talk about Eisenhower and Kennedy as well.

About Eisenhower he writes, “The matter of ‘faith’ has been in the papers again lately. President Eisenhower…has come out for prayer and has emphasized that most Americans are motivated (as they surely are) by religious faith. The Herald Tribune headed the story, ‘president says prayer is part of democracy.’ The implication in such a pronouncement, emanating from the seat of government, is that religious faith is a condition, or even a precondition, of democratic life. This is just wrong. A President should pray whenever and wherever he feels like it…but I don’t think a President should advertise prayer. That is a different thing. Democracy, if I understand it at all, is a society in which the unbeliever feels undisturbed and at home. If there were only a half a dozen unbelievers in America, their well-being would be a test of our democracy, their tranquility would be its proof…. I hope that Belief never is made to appear mandatory…. I distrust the slightest hint of a standard for political rectitude, knowing that it will open the way for persons in authority to set arbitrary standards of human behavior…. My wife, a spiritual but not a prayerful woman, read Mr. Eisenhower’s call to prayer in the Tribune and said something I shall never forget. ‘Maybe it’s all right,’ she said. ‘But for the first time in my life I’m beginning to feel like an outsider in my own land.'”

Of Acheson, White writes, “I believe, with the author, that security declines as security machinery expands. The machinery calls for a secret police. At first, this device is used solely to protect us from unsuitable servants in sensitive positions. Then it broadens rapidly and permeates nonsensitive areas, and finally, business and industry…. A secret-police system first unsettles, then desiccates, then calcifies a free society.”

Patricia Williams was astute to bring White’s essay to our attention again.

CAROLE S. APPEL

WILLIAMS REPLIES

New York City

What a wonderful letter. This is why I love The Nation and its readers–to say nothing of why I love the form of the essay, whether Emerson or E.B. White or Elie Wiesel. White is certainly the single most influential writer on my own thinking, particularly the pieces he did during the McCarthy era and, not coincidentally, during my formative New Yorker-reading years.

PATRICIA J. WILLIAMS

BOMBING FALLUJA’S HEALTH CENTER

Sharjah, United Arab Emirates

Thank you for Miles Schuman’s “Fulluja’s Health Damage” [Dec. 13]. I used it for a critical writing assignment in the advanced writing class I teach here in the United Arab Emirates–both because I wanted to give my Arab students a chance to analyze an effective argument on a topic that concerns them and because I was interested in their responses. As I guessed, they weren’t surprised by the information in the piece, but they were very surprised that a US magazine would run such an article, since they get their impression of the US newsmedia from the American network news on TV satellite.

Most of them felt that the most convincing evidence was listing the names of some of the victims. They also admired the rhetorical strategy of saving the declaration that the attacks constitute war crimes for the conclusion, because stating it in the thesis might make it seem like too absolute a claim. However, some of the students felt the piece would have been even more effective if Schuman had presented and then refuted the counterarguments.

I’ll leave you with a student’s quote, which suggests as much about America’s image as it does about the article. “Even though Miles Schuman is an American, he did a good job in creating an effective essay.”

JUDITH CAESAR

Geneva

We read with interest “Falluja’s Health Damage,” by Miles Schuman, which quotes UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour. On November 16 Mrs. Arbour expressed deep concern about the plight of civilians in Falluja and asked that violations of the rules be investigated and their perpetrators brought to justice. She did not “vow” to do this herself, as Schuman states, as that is not the mandate of our Office.

JOSÉ Luis DÍAZ
Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights

SCHUMAN REPLIES

Toronto

I thank Judith Caesar and her students for their comments. To José Luis Díaz: According to James Ross of Human Rights Watch, the High Commissioner does not herself initiate formal investigations. However, she may request to go to a country to assess a human rights situation or order others to go on her behalf. Mary Robinson, the former high commissioner, did exactly this in Kosovo, meeting with officials and gathering information about the situation there.

According to a 1999 UN High Commission for Human Rights press release, “Ms Robinson said she was outraged by reports of a vicious and systemic campaign conducted by Serbian military forces in Kosovo…. The High Commissioner requested the special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the former Yugoslavia to travel to the region to make a first-hand assessment of the situation. She asked the Special Representative on the situation of human rights in Rwanda to accompany him as her personal representative.” At the behest of Kofi Annan, Robinson launched an investigation of Indonesian human rights abuses in East Timor. So, the commissioner does have the mandate to investigate human rights abuses if asked by the UN Secretary General. If not asked, she may still request a visit to a country to make a firsthand assessment and go there herself or be represented by others without prior UN approval.

MILES SCHUMAN

GRAND GUIGNOL OLD PARTY

Chelmsford, Mass.

A sentence by Michael Ybarra in your January 24 Letters column rang a bell: “The Communist Party was a unique challenge precisely because it was not primarily a political entity but rather simultaneously a political entity and a conspiracy.” To what extent would the statement be true if “Republican Party” were substituted for “Communist Party”? I forbear to cite the many instances of public deception, covert totalitarian practice and secret manipulation that seem to prove the case.

ROBERT COLTMAN

Last year Kenneth Maxwell, a soft-spoken 63-year-old historian of Latin America, published a review of Peter Kornbluh’s The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability in the November/December 2003 issue of Foreign Affairs, the influential journal of the Council on Foreign Relations. As The Nation reported in June [see Sherman, “The Maxwell Affair,” June 21], Maxwell’s essay enraged two former statesmen with deep connections to the council–Henry Kissinger and his longtime associate William Rogers. Indeed, Maxwell was soon confiding to close friends, “I have clearly trodden on the tail of a very nasty snake here.” On May 13 Maxwell resigned from the council, where for fifteen years he had served as the chief Latin Americanist, and from Foreign Affairs, where he was the Western Hemisphere book reviewer, a perch from which he had published more than 300 reviews. What triggered Maxwell’s resignation was a smoldering exchange with Rogers in Foreign Affairs–an exchange, Maxwell insists, that was abruptly curtailed after Kissinger applied direct and indirect pressure on the editor of the journal, James Hoge. “The Council’s current relationship with Mr. Kissinger,” Maxwell wrote in his resignation letter to Hoge, “evidently comes at the cost of suppressing debate about his actions as a public figure. This I want no part of.”

Now, after months of silence about that suppressed debate, Maxwell has emerged with a 13,000-word essay about the affair, “The Case of the Missing Letter in Foreign Affairs.” His treatise, which is based on e-mail correspondence and a detailed personal diary he kept throughout the controversy, has been published as a heavily footnoted working paper by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University, where Maxwell is currently a senior fellow and visiting professor of history (the paper can be viewed at the center’s website at drclas.fas.harvard.edu). “The Case of the Missing Letter” is a riveting account of a row that has generated headlines throughout Latin America; it is also an unprecedented X-ray of power politics, cronyism and hubris inside the country’s pre-eminent foreign policy think tank. That Maxwell’s document should carry the imprimatur of the Rockefeller Center at Harvard is an exquisite coincidence, since David Rockefeller himself was chairman of the council’s board from 1970 to 1985.

Maxwell’s review of Kornbluh’s book, “The Other 9/11: The United States and Chile, 1973,” was not a fiery polemic but a measured assessment of US intervention in Chile in the early 1970s. Leslie Gelb, who was president of the council from 1993 to 2003, told Maxwell that he read it three times and felt that, politically, it was “straight down the middle.” Halfway through the piece, Maxwell criticized the Nixon-era policy-makers–primarily Kissinger–who contributed to the toppling of Chilean president Salvador Allende. “What is truly remarkable,” he wrote, “is the effort…to bring a Latin American democracy down, and the meager efforts since to build democracy back up.”

Kissinger, who has been affiliated with the council off and on since 1955, and Rogers, who served three terms on its board of directors, reacted swiftly to an essay that might have otherwise generated little notice on its own. Rogers, who worked with Kissinger at the State Department and is currently vice chair of Kissinger Associates, dispatched a furious letter to Foreign Affairs, which appeared in the January/February 2004 issue. “The myth that the United States toppled President Salvador Allende of Chile in 1973 lives,” Rogers wrote. “There is…no smoking gun. Yet the myth persists.” Rogers also endeavored to minimize Kissinger’s involvement in two highly controversial matters that figure prominently in Kornbluh’s book: the murder of Chilean Gen. René Schneider in 1970 and Operation Condor, a state-sponsored terror network set up by General Pinochet that from 1975 to 1977 targeted critics all over the Western Hemisphere and Europe. Among Condor’s victims was Orlando Letelier, Pinochet’s most prominent opponent in the United States, who was murdered, along with Ronni Moffitt, by a car bomb in Washington, DC, in 1976.

Round one of the exchange ended with a rejoinder by Maxwell in the same issue, in which he expressed incredulity at Rogers’s assertions and proceeded to interrogate a very delicate matter: Kissinger’s response to Operation Condor in general and the murder of Letelier in particular–a tragedy, Maxwell wrote, that might have been prevented had Kissinger maintained a less protective attitude toward General Pinochet. Closing his reply, Maxwell upped the ante and suggested “a way to clear the air” on Chile: “Some countries have established ‘truth commissions’ to look into such matters. In the United States, however, the record has been extracted painfully, like rotten teeth.” Rogers immediately fired off a second letter, which would appear in the March/April issue, in which he accused Maxwell of “bias,” denied that Kissinger bore any responsibility for Condor and ominously declared: “One would hope…that Maxwell’s views are understood to be his own and not those of the Council on Foreign Relations, where he is a senior fellow.” Curiously, back in December Hoge promised Rogers–and not his own book reviewer–the last word in the exchange. (Maxwell writes that in his eleven years at Foreign Affairs, not a single angry author was ever accorded the last word that was given to Rogers.)

On February 4 Maxwell delivered to James Hoge a seven-paragraph reply to Rogers’s second letter–a reply that effectively rebutted Rogers’s accusations and called on Kissinger himself to step forward and “clarify the record” about events in Chile. That document–“the missing letter” of Maxwell’s title–never appeared in Foreign Affairs. In a June interview with The Nation, Maxwell insisted that Kissinger and Rogers pressured Hoge to shut down the exchange, but he declined to elaborate on the specific ways in which that pressure was applied: “They know how to act in these matters, and they bring heavy guns to bear.”

Maxwell has now identified those “heavy guns”: Peter “Pete” Peterson, chair of the council’s board of directors, and Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, honorary vice chair of the council and chair and chief executive officer of the embattled American International Group (AIG), the world’s largest commercial insurer, which recently agreed to pay $126 million in penalties to the US government to settle a fraud case. Peterson and Greenberg are, in Maxwell’s view, a formidable pair: “Neither is a man to be crossed lightly.”

“The Case of the Missing Letter” creates new difficulties for James Hoge, who in June vehemently denied that he had received direct (or indirect) pressure from Kissinger. “Mr. Hoge…denied that Mr. Kissinger had pressured him. He demanded that Mr. Maxwell produce proof of his accusation,” Diana Jean Schemo wrote in the New York Times on June 16. Earlier, on June 1, Hoge had told The Nation, “I never talked to Henry Kissinger about this at all, nor has anybody else told me that Henry had a view one way or the other.” A few days later Hoge told David Glenn of The Chronicle of Higher Education: “I didn’t talk to Henry Kissinger, I didn’t talk to anybody…these are editor’s decisions, which I made. Period.” However, Peterson, contradicting the editor, admitted to Glenn that he did indeed phone Hoge in December to convey Kissinger’s unhappiness, but he denied that he trespassed on editorial decision-making at Foreign Affairs: “I have great respect for Hoge and for the independence of that magazine.”

In late January Maxwell, seeking to insure that he would have the opportunity to rebut Rogers’s second missive, left a number of messages for Hoge, who was traveling. Hoge got back to him on January 26. Writes Maxwell: “He did not want to discuss the Kissinger-Rogers matter on the phone, he said, and insisted on a personal meeting.” That discussion took place on Friday, January 30, in Hoge’s book-lined office overlooking East 68th Street. “We were alone and I was conscious of the fact he wanted it this way.” Maxwell offers this description of the meeting:

Hoge explained he had been subjected to great pressure from Henry Kissinger. He said that “Henry will not speak to me or shake my hand.” He…told me Peterson had called on Kissinger’s behalf. He said he was called and “sworn at for half an hour” by [Maurice] Greenberg…. He said of Kissinger: “Henry has a very dark side,” and that Kissinger had sought to interfere before in Foreign Affairs during the editorship of his predecessor William (“Bill”) Hyland. He said that he did not think that the breach that resulted between Kissinger and Hyland, who were old friends, had “ever been fully repaired.” Very much on his mind, it seemed to me, was how far he could go in criticizing Kissinger without having a similar breach.

By the time Maxwell resigned on May 13, “Kissinger was…speaking to Hoge again.”

The leadership of the Council on Foreign Relations has long maintained that a “church-state separation” divides the council from Foreign Affairs, but Maxwell’s account turns that assertion on its head. By choosing to exert his influence through two close friends and business associates–Peter Peterson and Maurice Greenberg–Kissinger, Maxwell writes, “had chosen his messengers well.” Both Peterson, as chair, and Greenberg, as honorary vice chair, possess gargantuan influence at the council and maintain an active interest in its affairs. On December 18, at the council’s holiday staff party, Maxwell learned from Hoge and Peterson that Greenberg, who was not present, was indignant about his review of The Pinochet File. As Maxwell confided to his diary the following morning: “[Greenberg, according to Hoge] claimed KM [Maxwell] accused HK [Kissinger] of ‘killing babies’–Jim told him [Greenberg] to read piece!” Maxwell was shaken by the holiday party, for it revealed to him for the first time the full dimensions of the “firestorm Kissinger had initiated.”

Maxwell has brought the full range of his scholarly abilities to bear on “The Case of the Missing Letter,” and the footnotes painstakingly delineate an interlocking web of connections between Kissinger, Peterson and Greenberg. The Kissinger-Peterson relationship began in the Nixon Administration, when Peterson was international economic adviser and later Secretary of Commerce, and carried over into civilian life: The Peterson-led Blackstone Group, according to its website, maintains a “strategic alliance” with Kissinger Associates to provide “financial advisory services to corporations seeking high-level strategic advice.” Kissinger, likewise, is no stranger at Greenberg’s AIG: In 1987 Greenberg appointed Kissinger chairman of AIG’s international advisory group, where, according to Walter Isaacson’s Kissinger: A Biography, he assisted the insurance giant with lucrative business deals in Argentina, Peru, Malaysia and South Korea.

In turn, Peterson and Greenberg were excellently positioned to assist Kissinger at the Council on Foreign Relations. Both men have been exceedingly generous to the institution–contributing, Maxwell notes, “more than $34 million between them directly in personal donations and indirectly, via the privately-held Blackstone Group in the case of Peterson, and, in the case of Greenberg, via the Starr Foundation, of which he is chairman.” Signs of Greenberg’s largesse are evident at the council’s 68th Street headquarters: there is a Greenberg Reception Room, a Greenberg Chair and a Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies.

Greenberg and Peterson also have influence at Foreign Affairs magazine. Maxwell notes that both men have contributed to the endowment of the chair that Hoge holds as editor, which is named for…Peter Peterson.

On May 13 Maxwell submitted his letter of resignation to Hoge and to Richard Haass, the president of the council. The next day Hoge replied by e-mail and made this astonishing claim: “Your May 13 letter contains speculation about supposed pressures from Mr. Kissinger. As I have previously told you, Mr. Rogers is the only person involved with whom I have discussed this matter.” Repeated efforts by The Nation to reach Hoge were unsuccessful: He did not return phone calls. Likewise, Kissinger, Peterson, Greenberg and Haass all declined to discuss Maxwell’s allegations. Only William Rogers made himself available. Asked if Kissinger applied direct pressure on Hoge–or indirect pressure through Peterson and Greenberg–Rogers replied: “Not that I know of. I’m sure not. He would never be so tactless. I believe that he told me that he washed his hands of the whole thing.”

Maxwell believes that an “official line” on the affair was soon hammered out by Hoge and Haass. At an all-staff meeting on June 15, in front of 200 people, Haass declared that the press accounts about Maxwell’s departure were false; that Hoge, an “extraordinary editor,” had made an “editorial judgment” to stop the exchange; and that a “church-state separation” existed between the council and Foreign Affairs. Less than an hour before the meeting, Maxwell was confidentially warned that Haass planned to address the controversy. Speaking in his own defense at the meeting, Maxwell, who left the council on July 1, told the staff, “I have had fifteen very happy years at the council. It seems obvious that I would not have resigned at this stage of my career unless I had very good reasons for doing so.”

The departure of Maxwell, The Nation wrote in June, “raises questions about intellectual freedom at the council; about editorial independence at Foreign Affairs…and about Kissinger’s and Rogers’s influence” on the institution. Haass, who became president in 2003, has thus far neglected his responsibility to address these matters publicly. But privately he seems to possess a keen understanding of the emotionally charged issues that continue to swirl around Kissinger’s Chile policy in the early 1970s. The morning after the holiday party, December 19, 2003, Maxwell ran into Haass at 8 am, when both men were arriving for work. As Maxwell soon confided to his diary: “Haass said: ‘this is [an] issue that still gets under everyone’s skin 30 years later!'”

In the summer of 1953, the New School for Social Research hung a yellow curtain over a mural by the Mexican artist José Clemente Orozco. Orozco’s transgression? He had included portraits of Lenin and Stalin in the work. In response to widespread criticism, the president of the institution, Hans Simons, insisted that the decision to hang the curtain was an internal matter–“a problem of the school,” which did not concern “the outside.” In the first essay of the first issue of Dissent, a new left-wing quarterly, Irving Howe, the driving force behind the journal, threw himself into the controversy.

“One is not shocked at this,” wrote Howe, “the language is familiar enough, go a step further and you have the American Legion or the DAR telling one to go back where you came from. But wait: The philistine reference to ‘the outside’ comes not from the American Legion but from the New School, the New School which began as a refuge for liberalism and freedom. Well, Dr. Simons, one is sorry to say this, but the mural is not merely ‘a problem of the school’; and one would be delighted to go back where one came from: New York.”

Howe’s salvo exemplified the spirit of the new journal, whose chief mission was to confront the poison of McCarthyism, to combat what the editors called “the bleak atmosphere of conformism that pervades the political and intellectual life of the United States,” and to forge a new kind of anti-Stalinist leftism. Still, Howe’s rhetorical bravado masked a certain malaise, for Dissent was a self-proclaimed socialist journal. “We shall try,” Dissent‘s mission statement modestly noted, “to discuss freely and honestly what in the socialist tradition remains alive and what needs to be discarded or modified.” The editors–who included hardened veterans of the New York intellectual scuffles of the 1930s but also refugees from Hitler’s Germany–had no illusions about the task that faced them. “In America today,” they wrote, “there is no significant socialist movement and…in all likelihood, no such movement will appear in the immediate future.”

Despite that bleak forecast, Dissent, which turns fifty this year, shone brightly in its first decade with a steady stream of reportage, analysis and polemic: C. Wright Mills, Ignazio Silone, Meyer Schapiro, Czeslaw Milosz, Hannah Arendt, Dwight Macdonald, Gabriel Kolko and Dan Wakefield did superb work for Dissent in the 1950s. Richard Wright’s White Man, Listen! and Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd were excerpted in Dissent, and Norman Mailer, who lent his name to the editorial board, gave Howe “The White Negro,” a berserk and brilliant essay that, in a sense, anticipated the 1960s counterculture and became one of the most celebrated and controversial pieces in the journal’s entire history.

If the analysis and polemic were frequently top-notch in the early years, so was the reporting: Dissent produced special issues on Africa, youth culture, New York City and the American workplace, and published fine dispatches about the burgeoning civil rights movement in the South. Another keen area of interest for the editors was the American labor movement: “In the 1950s,” Maurice Isserman wrote in his book If I Had a Hammer, “Dissent was the only intellectual quarterly to pay serious attention to the labor movement and to issues pertaining to the workplace.” (Some auto- and steelworker locals even ordered bulk subscriptions of Dissent for their members, a practice that continued until the early 1990s.)

The birth of the New Left in the early 1960s should have been a tonic for Dissent, but Howe and his comrades clashed with the new radicals. A 1962 meeting between Dissent editors and leaders of Students for a Democratic Society was a failure: In Tom Hayden’s “clenched style,” Howe later recalled, “one could already see the beginnings of a commissar.” There were brawls over Cuba, over “representative” versus “participatory” democracy, over the role of the working class. In 1965, Howe published “New Styles in ‘Leftism,'” a corrosive and sarcastic assault on the young radicals, who went on to shun the journal. Deprived of the finest young talent–who correctly felt that Dissent was less than honest about the Vietnam War–Dissent became a different magazine in the 1960s: The fire and freshness of the first decade hardened into something more academic, chilly and reactive. When co-editor Lewis Coser addressed the crack-up of the New Left in a 1970 essay headlined, “Indeed, They Did Grow Up Absurd,” there was no mistaking his sense of Schadenfreude.

The 1970s and early ’80s was not a stellar period for Dissent, but the journal endured and the founding editors gradually passed the reins to a younger generation, some of whom had New Left connections. Writers like Robert Kuttner, Harold Meyerson, Deborah Meier, Jervis Anderson and Michael Harrington helped define Dissent in the years after Vietnam, as did international voices like George Konrád, Octavio Paz and Roy Medvedev, whose political and literary sensibilities dovetailed nicely with Howe & Co.

These days, Dissent, which is edited by Michael Walzer and Mitchell Cohen, and which has a circulation of 11,000, is not a galvanizing force in the world of writing and politics. The prose is often dry and professorial; the pages rarely catch fire in one’s hands. It remains a magazine, as Walzer once put it, “for people who know how to worry.” Still, in every issue one finds lively, jargon-free essays and reportage (not infrequently penned by up-and-coming writers) along with debates and exchanges on a wide range of topics: globalization, identity politics, Hillary Clinton and feminism, intervention in Kosovo, crime, bohemia, and the fate of social democracy. These debates and discussions, almost always vibrant, serve as a reminder that, in dim political times especially, Dissent assumes a function that goes beyond critical writing: At its best, the journal becomes something akin to a foghorn or a life raft–“an open political and cultural space,” Marshall Berman has written, “where democratic socialists who really meant it and survivors of the New Left could talk and listen and think and learn from each other, and have arguments without walking out, and imagine a golden age.”

At its worst Dissent becomes a finger-wagging grandfather. In spring 2002, Walzer, infuriated by demonstrations against the Afghan war, published “Can There Be a Decent Left?,” a stinging and much-discussed indictment of an American left that is full of “festering resentment, ingrown anger and self-hate,” a left that turns “world politics into a cheap melodrama.” In its tightly coiled fury, and its readiness to paint in very broad strokes, Walzer’s essay called to mind, uncomfortably, Howe’s polemics against the New Left. One of the more successful essays Dissent published in the 1990s was Michael Lind’s “Why Intellectual Conservatism Died.” Lind knew who his real foes were and lashed them accordingly. When, in the age of Bush, Dissent‘s co-editor brings his full polemical energies to bear on the fragmented universe of American radicalism, one can’t escape the sense that Dissent is trapped in its own history, doomed to an interminable string of family feuds.

The people who founded Dissent set a herculean task for themselves: to revive the socialist project in America. Did they in any way succeed? On that question, Irving Howe, who died in 1993, was less than ebullient. “At times,” he wrote in his autobiography, A Margin of Hope, “we seemed to have almost nothing left but the animating ethic of socialism, and we knew that an ethic, no matter how admirable, could never replace a politics. But if you took that ethic seriously and persisted in struggling for modes of realization, you could have enough intellectual work for a lifetime.” It was Dissent‘s fate, he confided in a different context, to “scratch away at what is.” Sustaining a socialist quarterly is no easy task in these United States, but fifty years later, Dissent, happily, is still with us–scratching, thinking, nail-biting, arguing.